Chapter One

Sitting in the barbers chair and looking at the mirror at myself, I see myself as a man in my forty’s. Two days of stubble, and wry grin. It’s kinda a hard look for me. The moon pale skin and brown eyes that have seen enough to know too much, in a world that has been at war for twenty years.

The barber knows what he’s doing and asks how I want the back to look. “Strait across in the back.” I answer him, he takes his trusty clippers and makes the line and tapers the length from the edge of the line to the top.

The barber finishes the job and I look into the mirror at his work. Clean lines, hard disconnect, and short in all the right places. Not to mention it’s still long in all the right places.

I pay the barber with a coin and walk out. In the back of my mind the guy looked familiar, even though I had never seen him before in my life. It was like somehow it was someone I should have recognized. A face remembered and not forgotten. Sometimes the names change, but the faces don’t.

In the forty years I have been on this planet, I have seen the moon smash the earth five hundred and twenty times. Every time it happens its the same thing. The people that are still alive are moved to new bodies that have been pre loaded with enough vaccine to withstand twenty-eight days of the virus before the moon smashes the earth again.

The Process

Then the process happens all over again. I have been in this world though means of a simulation that allows me to see what the people in this planet experience without having the physical effects of suffering from the virus. Not to mention having the moon smash my mind to bits every twenty-eight days.

The people that are really here don’t know what is happening. They are being kept drugged to the point that they don’t know what is being done to them or why. All they know is they wake up and live their lives, and sometimes when they die have their memories wiped out. Then they are given new identities and have to start living again as if nothing had ever happened.

There are only so many designs for the bodies they have, and a lot of the people look the same. Sometimes people seem familiar when they are really very different people inside. My mission comes to a close tonight as this will be the end of my research project. We got what we needed from the research and will be able to not only move towards finding a cure for the virus. More importantly is stopping the aliens that stole the designs to the human body from us and making these people that aren’t aware of what is being done free people from the slavery they have been hit with.

What is Freedom?

Upon my return home, I make a note of what is playing on iTunes. The song sound like something i know the tune of, and it’s still set to the right album or playlist.

I have been making research notes in my journals for years about this world, and the people here. What I think of the whole process. Because I know they are going to come in handy later. My research has been done, and when I go to bed tonight I know that I will wake up in another world. Far from here, but where home really is. That’s not the problem, the problem is when I wake up, I’m coming back here through a different method. Not through a virtual reality simulation, but by space travel.

We have a mission, the question is can my team solve the world’s problems in time? Before it’s too late? We were searching for a cure to a virus, in that search I found that the problem goes deeper than that. That’s a surface problem, but the real issue is whether we can make a difference in these people’s lives that changed the course of human history for the better going forward into the next hundred centuries.

Midnight Confessions

Midnight rolls around and I make the last notes in my journals for the entry for my return. I turn the light off and lay in the dark listening to the music. As I close my eyes and gently fall asleep i’m awoken to a new sensation, re-animation through a virtual connection that has a hard line in reality.

It’s always tricky getting all the bits put back into the right order, and since I have a physical body on the other side of this virtual connection It’s simply a matter of waking up on the other side with my memory intact.

Back Home

“Hey stranger, how did your research project go?” It’s Amber and am I glad to see her. I unhook the terminal from my arm and wrap my arms around her and give her a big hug. “How long have I been gone?” Is my first question to ask.

“Not long, a few weeks.” She replies to me. “It felt like forty years of life to me on my side of the world.”

“Did you find the problem?” She asks in hopes that our mission will be successful. “Yes, but there are more than one problem. It seems there is a virus in the planet that has taken form. There is however a bigger problem.”

“What’s that? How big?” She asks me.

“It’s huge, the powers that be have taken to hiding the problem from the people by smashing the moon into the earth every twenty-eight days and then loading the new bodies with anti-bodies for the virus into the people that still live.”

“They can’t cure the virus, and they don’t know how to make a human body live longer than twenty-eight days without re-animation of the old people.”

“Geez that sounds heavy. How can we help?” She asks me lightly.

Send Help

“We’re going to have to find out how to cure the virus and make people live longer than twenty-eight days. There is also the issue of the fact that this has been going on for centuries and the people have been lied to for so long that they almost resemble zombies in their day to day lives.”

Amber takes a look at the file from my simulation, and the records present that shows the effects of having been on another world for that long.

“You got a clean bill of health here, none of the virus has been infected into your current body.” She says.

“We need to go through the records and find every last trace of the virus and how to cure it. Even if that means redesigning their DNA code from the ground up.”

“They don’t know do they?” Amber asks me with a serious tone in her voice. “No they don’t have a clue, the aliens have hidden their agenda so well that the people will never know.”