Goodie waved as he watched the van drive off.

He felt like an idiot for doing so—the thing being little smarter than a dog, but that was still more than smart enough to trigger his Skynet sense. A sense he was not even aware of until the van had spoken to him of its own volition.

Admittedly, it was a pre-programed volition…probably, but still…

It had not been the first A.I. he had encountered since awakening in this new world, but it was the first one he had met that had no vested interest in his survival.

“May I suggest we initiate the restless protocol?” it had asked.

They, meaning him and his passengers, had collectively wet themselves when the vehicle had uttered those words. It was especially terrifying considering they had just been discussing getting rid of the thing.

Silly, really. Once he had begun prodding it with questions, it quickly became obvious that the thing was just that: a thing. Programming comprehensive enough that it had roughly the same intelligence of a movie critic, the focus being on where transport and travel were concerned, but was severely lacking in its ability to adapt to anything outside of that programming, with no real awareness beyond what was needed to perform its primary function.

So again, like a movie critic.

A restless protocol was something cooked up by the previous owners—may they rest in peace—a little script that would keep the van on the move so long as it had the energy to do so. Energy which it would and could snag from legitimate sources and not. It would rotate around…well, he had no clue where it was going; he had been stuck in a lab for who knew how long, and a small room before that when he was still back in the past, only venturing forth when his owners and guardians needed him to perform, so his knowledge of the world at large, now or then, had largely been absent.

It was not the city; he knew that at least. Especially not with all the streets overflowing with trash.

The man calling himself John—the other one, not the dead one—had told him to dump the thing. Which was probably what Goodie should have done, but with him having been denied even the privilege of being able to decide when he went to the bathroom for the past few years, let alone being able to own anything, he was feeling clingy and rebellious. That feeling, combined with what he had seen of its abilities so far and what he assumed to be a hoard of valuable equipment stored in the back of the vehicle, instilled within him reluctance to part with the machine.

Still, he also did not want it near him for fear of it being used to track him down or…if the art of hacking had not gone out of fashion, ride his arse over as soon as he turned his back.

A sentiment his passengers, aside from Resources, echoed.

So, they had organised that the machine would do whatever it was going to do, then return to the city’s entrance at the end of the month, wait between six and eight a.m., and then, if he did not show up, repeat the pattern, with the exception that it would then return once every week at and for the same time.

It seemed the safest way to for them to both get their cake and be able to eat it. That was what he told himself, but a niggling sensation at the back of his consciousness kept reminding him that, despite recent events, his life and run of luck had always been…less than good.

And again, his passengers agreed. Except for Resources.

“Well, no doing anything about it now,” he said as he watched the van disappear around a pile of mascot heads whose false fur had long rotted away to half-reveal the wire mesh beneath.

[You cannot change the past. We only waste time by waiting here.]

“I know, I know.”

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

Goodie turned to look at the entrance to the building behind him. He did not know why he had been bought to this one in particular, but it sort of looked official—and it was near the centre of the city, so hoped it was where he was supposed to go.

The entrance consisted of a series of glass double-doors all forming a half-circle with a colossal statue playing guard at either end. They were like that Oscar award, their detail clear but minimal, but only one of them was male in appearance.

[An official establishment should be an acceptable source of information]

[Enter through the side, ambushers would most likely focus on the central entrance]

[Agreed] [I Concur]

[That could have been worded better, but yes, you should remain on guard. That man would not have anything to gain from setting you up after giving you so much, especially when he already had you in his possession.]

Goodie said nothing in reply. They had already come up with a plan on how to proceed; taking a cue from the man calling himself John, he was going to go by the name Goodie Johnson, relying on the quirk of his throat implant to pass himself off as female. A notion he would have never dared entertain before they boxed him up, not merely because he was a guy, but on account of him having looked like the world’s smallest gorilla, with far too much overall hair and a body wider than it was tall.

Now…now he was different. Thin, tall, and…pretty. He had no idea why his captors had made him this way, but he was damn well going to use it to his advantage.

Of course, when he said they discussed things, he meant his passengers did the talking. Without him. Goodie would be the first to admit that they were far more intelligent than he was—faster, too, in terms of mental processes, but still, he had spent the majority of his life being used by everyone and it was unsettling that even hundreds of years in the future, nothing had changed that.

But needs came before wants.

‘Goodie Johnson. Goodie Johnson. Goodie Johnson,’ he repeated as he tried to memorise the name, the stress caused by the effort of that task far greater than was warranted, not because of the stakes involved, but because of a lifetime of being himself.

There was a thing called “Future Shock”, a phenomenon where too much change or development within too little time could inflict emotional or mental trauma on the individual or individuals witness to such changes—and he had been experiencing it a lot lately—but not for the reasons that he would have thought would be responsible.

Someone had once said that seeing something on television was better than doing so in reality. While that declaration was debatable, he was experiencing proof of its validity right here and now. Spaceships, giant cities, talking cars…he could name any number of shows and games where such things were better implemented, his real-life encounters with those elements being rather lacklustre.

No, what truly hit home was the stuff that he could not see.

He was trying desperately to remember a single name because he had always had to do so before. Neglect, abuse, poor health and a slew of other factors had always made such tasks difficult, even near impossible at times, his memory of even the current day fluttering away with the wind. Now, if he wanted to remember something, he more or less did. And even if he did not, something inside his body would do it for him. Not one of his passengers, another of his implants, he assumed. Both he or the others remained ignorant as to what had been put inside of him—Goodie for being him, and his passengers for needing to isolate themselves to ensure their safety, the implant hosting them unconnected or isolated to the others within him.

John and his lot had assured him that whoever had had him before had also scrubbed his system, whatever that meant, so everything was running on basic, if not offline altogether. They of course uploaded something to track him—spy on him—or whatever. They did not say so, but Goodie would be a fool to think otherwise.

But something was helping him to think, to remember thing; names would be offered up to him almost before he even began an attempt to recall them, sums solved almost immediately, no matter their complexity. Not displayed through some fancy visual overlay, they were just there, in his head.

If he did not know his mind, he might have mistaken them for his own thoughts or memories, but they were not.

Now, he was heavily into science-fiction, not science-fantasy, so he was the last person to lean into the paranormal tropes of the genre. But for the longest time, he genuinely considered that someone was using telepathy on him when it first started to happen, the helpful thoughts that came to him feeling as alien as they were beneficial. Silly, yes, but in his defence, he had been far from a healthy mindset at the time. More than usual, that is.

And then there was the walking.

Goodie passed through the leftmost entrance, the glass doors sliding aside as he glided through them, his footwork agile and deliberate, each step as silent as a whisper.

Now, one would normally consider such physical action to be abnormal for the reason behind them being done, not for their ability to be done. But it was exactly that aptitude that was the problem.

It was not just about his immense loss of weight that he was disturbed by his newfound grace—when he was thirteen, Stoneports’s rich-bitch, Gregory Thompson, had beaten the living shit out of him, the right-half of his body near crippled from the assault. Goodie had lived with that injury long enough that he had completely forgotten what it was like to stand without feeling pain. Now, he could barely remember what it was like to stand with that pain, his legs so complete, so wholesome in strength that each step threatened to cause him to leap into the air.

It sounded nice on paper, but to go from having to watch every step he made to avoid crashing to the floor to being so fit that he had to watch every step he made lest he go flying into the air and then come crashing to the floor was a cruel joke.

A few amongst a series of improvements whose effects constantly served to remind him of just how out of his depth he was, how ignorant he was of this new world.

Goodie quickly approached the large desk where a twenty-something, blue-eyed brunette was slouched in a puffy-looking office chair, her gaze affixed to a tablet, which emanated the sound of someone speaking in a language he could not understand.

Her eyes darted to him and widened, an artificial smile crossing her lips as she stood up.

Every part of Goodie, artificial and organic, warned him to not screw things up. “Stick to the name, stick to the plan,” they warned him.

‘Goodie Johnson. Goodie Johnson. DO NOT ‘F’ THIS UP!’

He hesitated as a light flickered across the woman’s eyes, her smile then shifting into a more genuine one.

“Ah, Mr. Goodwill. We’ve been expecting you.”

Somewhere inside of him, near his intestinal system, Goodie felt an implant indicate to him that its remaining capacity had decreased by two-point-seven percent.