Logan found himself floating in nothingness. It was dark, he was weightless and blind, but he could hear two voices talking.

“Would you look at that?” The other voice said, high pitched, excited, and somehow… electrical.

“What in Six Hells is it?” the other one said, it was a lower tone, but fast and also electrical.

“Some device. Pretty advanced for Humans,” The first one said.

“Well shut it off. There’s rules.”

“I can’t.”

“What?” The second one asked, the low register picking up an alarmed tone.

“It’s embedded in this one’s brain. It’d kill him if I removed it.”

“Oh great… Do we take this one to the higher ups?”

“You really want to do that?” The first one asked.

“No…”

“Let me just see what this thing— Oh no…”

“That bad, huh?”

“It’s bad,” The first one said and sighed. “This is like a… sapient memory bank.”

“It’s self-aware?”

“Well it sure is now that we ran the System Awakening Protocol,” The first one muttered.

“Old Gods,” The second one sighed heavily. “I am NOT putting this in my report.”

“Me neither, but we can’t leave this thing as it is. He will develop too fast.”

“Aren’t we looking for problem solvers?” The second one asked.

“You know how it is,” The first one reminded him. “If he builds a megacity in a month, Levemoth will destroy them.”

Logan wondered idly how he could even understand these beings. They didn’t sound anything like human. He could feel some faint prodding in his head, a light pressure with twinges. Logan figured it should have hurt, but it just didn’t.

“Can you remove the knowledge?” The second voice asked.

“I have to try,” The first one said distractedly as it apparently prodded around in Logan’s head. “But the knowledge matrix is delicate. If we lobotomize a candidate, there’s hell to pay.”

“If YOU lobotomize a candidate, you mean?”

“Shut up. I need to focus. Okay…. Circuitry, mechanics… Guns, huh? Well unless he figures some stuff out, those won't do much… Damn it!”

“What is it?” The second one asked, slightly alarmed.

“I can’t remove any of this, or it will mess up with the general logic facility. It’s going to go insane, if I just chop off half of what it knows.”

“So what’s the plan?”

“I just need to lock them.”

“Lock them…?” The second one asked. “That would mean you’d give it a class!”

“I know what it means!” The first one hissed. “Any better ideas?”

There was a moment of silence.

“...No.”

“I’ll just give it [Engineer]. I’ll lock stuff like circuitry and explosives in the mid-tier.”

“You’re just giving it a class? Right from the get-go? You sure that’s a good idea?”

“I don’t know what the hell I’m doing,” The first voice snapped. “What am I supposed to make of this? A sentient computer inside a guy’s brain? I’m winging it. Speaking of which. Oops.”

“Oops?” The second voice was alarmed. “What do you mean OOPS?!?”

“Fiddling with the memory matrix might have touched the technology more than intended.”

“Anything serious?”

“It’s going to distract the candidate more than intended, that’s for sure.”

“Shit!” The second voice whispered. “I just got a ping. They’re asking what’s taking so long. They’re sending a tier three admin.”

“Shit. Well this is gonna have to do,” The first voice said. “We’ll just put him—”

“There’s no time! We got six seconds. Just toss the candidate somewhere!”

“I can’t—”

“NOW!”

*

Logan found himself on a smooth, slightly damp floor of a cave. Well, after a cursory look it actually appeared not to be a cave, but more of a… Dungeon?

It was dim, but there was a faint blue glow lining the corners and seams of the roof and floor, where the walls connected, like ropes of LED Christmas lights. The room he was in was clearly man-made with its smooth stone walls and mathematical angles.

89.72 degrees. That’s extreme precision. Wait what?

Oh right, the AI. A part of Logan hoped his father had landed face first into this world. What the hell had even happened? They had been teleported somewhere. And there were these two guys discussing… It was all bleary and dreamlike. The more Logan thought about the two people talking, the less he could remember. Something about the AI…

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

[Reconfiguring Neural Matrix… 1% Completion]

“That’s… interesting,” Logan muttered to himself. That had been like a thought in his mind, but it had its own voice. A monotone, mechanical intonation that cut through the chatter, completely unlike his own inner voice.

All of this was certainly interesting. He had been sucked into another place. And that dream— No, not a dream. A memory. They had said he was a ‘candidate’. What did that mean? What did any of this mean?

Well, I’ve got enough questions now. Let’s find some answers.

Logan got up and looked around. There wasn’t anything interesting in the room. Nothing, he could use at least, just rubble on the floor from a wall cracked an eternity ago.

The crack on the otherwise smooth wall was enough to attract Logan’s attention. He looked at it and saw a mural of intricate craftsmanship. Within the mural a crowd of people stood on a hillside, looking at a mountain, half covered in bright white clouds. Next to the mountain, as if guarding it was a beast. It was blue and black shape, almost as large as the mountain. It had a great maw, like that of a whale, with thousands of tiny black teeth. A hundred eyes looking in every direction were upon its head, and a cradle of horns was atop its brow, white as a full moon, pointing in every direction. The creature’s body was obscured in a dark lightning cloud, which rained black rain on the ground. On the ground was a great city, caught in smoke, flame and desolation.

“Jesus, I hope that’s a metaphor,” Logan muttered to himself. But a word echoed in his mind. Levemoth.

Now Logan had more questions, and no answers. Not exactly the direction he wanted to take. He needed to think clearly.

Get out of this place, shelter, water and food and find out where Freya is.

That was as good a plan as any. Logan noticed a doorway on the other side of the room. The door itself had been half-decayed by time and was now mostly rubble on the ground and a chunk hanging off a hinge. The blue light was brighter in that room, so Logan went towards it.

The next room was an atrium. High ceiling and seven or eight doorways towards every corner of the octagonal room. On the walls were more beautiful murals lit up by a giant floating crystal in the middle of the room. It pulsed and hummed.

“This…” Logan muttered. “I’m not on Earth anymore, am I? This is… Is it magic?

Floating could of course be achieved by superconductivity, magnetism or a steady propulsion.

Wait, how did I…?

[Reconfiguring Neural Matrix… 2% Completion]

But this didn’t feel like technology. When the floating crystal pulsed, Logan could feel it inside his body like a second heartbeat. It engaged a sense Logan never knew he had. This wasn’t magnetism, this wasn’t the sensation of pressure on his skin. This was energy.

Logan took a few tentative steps closer to the crystal. There was a pressure to it, but it was gentle. Upon the ground were flecks and shards, as if chipped and eroded from the glowing blue crystal. They also had a glow to them, albeit faint. Logan fell on a knee and picked one up.

Even as small as the chip of crystal was, there was definitely power within it. It was heavier than you’d think. It had a similar heft to a lithium battery. But the energy within it wasn’t similar in nature at all. The energy that Logan could feel in his palm had a richness and urgency to it. The crystal chip basically yelled and demanded at Logan. “USE ME!” it said.

Logan didn’t know what to make of it, but he brought it between his thumb and index finger to eye level. It looked like the chip of crystal had movement within it. Like it was alive somehow. Then the strangest thing happened. A small box of text appeared next to the crystal.

[F-grade Numa Crystal, 100%]

What the..?

Logan picked up another one of those crystals and the exact same text appeared in mid-air. He tried blinking and moving his head. It still stayed above the little glowing crystal. It was only when he moved his hand, that the text vanished.

Interesting.

Logan didn’t know what the hell these things were, but his intuition told him that they were a good thing. And with that thought guiding him, he decided on a new order of business. Shelter, food, water, strange magic crystals, then find Freya. And with that he started stuffing his pockets with the little chips.

He found a handful of the F-grade variants, which made his pockets bulge. But there was also a bigger chunk further away from the crystal, the size of a baby’s fist. Rather satisfied with his find, Logan picked it up.

[E-grade Numa Crystal, 72%]

What does that percentage mean? Is it charge? Where is an instruction manual when I need it? Hey. AI, got a theory?

The genie of his mind had no answer. Logan figured it was most likely a charge, but why he was seeing it like this was anybody’s guess.

He looked around for a bit more in the dim blue light, and found a few more chips, while clutching the E-grade crystal. Logan only stopped when he saw something stir in the corner of his vision. A lumbering movement and a heavy breath. He froze and listened.

There was a rumbling growl and two sharp blue eyes attached to a large shape in the shadows. The eyes were the shape of a predatory oval and their stare was greedy.

“Fuck.”

Instincts told Logan to bolt for it, and that was what he did. Wasting no time, he went into a sprint towards the nearest door. If it led him to a dead end, that’d be it. There was no time to second-guess.

Something swiped at the space Logan had inhabited half a second ago. Logan had exploded too fast, and now his other thigh was feeling a bit sprained. Despite that, he kept running. But he couldn’t help himself. He had to know. He looked over his shoulder.

It was black and blue, the size of a baby elephant. Its skin was sleek and oily. Ugly thing with four long arms at the front, and four at the back. It barreled towards Logan like a gorilla, sharp teeth covered in spittle and froth as it roared.

There was no door to bar, but the creature was too large to get through the doorway. Logan ran and a long corridor with no turns. The blue lines on both edges of the floor guided Logan forward as he gasped for air. The many-limbed creature tried to barrel through the door. Logan could feel and hear that it couldn’t smash through.

Logan slowed down to a jog and grinned. “Hah, that’s what you get for being a dumb brute!”

Then something happened that Logan’s brain couldn’t fully process. The creature’s features morphed and shifted, and suddenly it had transformed into two quadrupedal creatures, with a singular sharp blue eye and an unhinged maw. They stumbled their few steps, before they sped up to agile pounces with which they covered yards at a time

Ahead Logan saw another doorway. He sped up his sprint, lungs ablaze, legs screaming agony. Still he ran, survival instinct and all that. He noticed the door was whole and still on both of its hinges. With a spike of adrenaline he slammed the door behind him.

Logan could faintly hear the creatures claw and scream, but the door seemed to stop them. At first.

They gave Logan just enough of a lead for him to see the next door ahead. But they got the door open and continued the chase.

He couldn’t keep running. He was no athlete and that sprint for his life had sapped him. Those things were predators, and they would catch him.

Humans can’t outmuscle beasts.

So when he slammed the second door behind him closed, he threw his weight against it. The two beasts slammed against the door and screeched. It made Logan’s stomach lurch. The monsters pushed and got the door to slit ajar. Logan roared and smashed against the door.

He looked around frantically. Nothing to bar the door. They were so strong. Cold sweat ran down his back.

Is this how I die?

It was absolutely unacceptable. He had to find a solution. But he didn’t have any tools. Then he looked down at the glowing blue crystal in his hand. He scoffed in disbelief. Well what did he have to lose at this point?

He clutched the E-rank crystal and pressed it against the door.

“Abrakadabra? Fuck this. Look! Magic the door please! Bar it. Make it really heavy. Make it stay closed!”

Suddenly a surge of soft warmth enveloped the hand holding the crystal. It hummed, like the big monolith had done in the atrium and then it dimmed.

The door didn’t feel any different, but when the creatures threw their weight against it as they screeched and pounded at the door, it didn’t feel so urgent and visceral this time. Logan took the rock from the door and looked down at it. It no longer held any blue glow.

[E-grade Numa Crystal, 0%]