Hybrid .4 (Book One of The Upgrade Trilogy)

I'll Never Wake Up Without An Overdose

This was the weirdest museum I'd seen in...forever. All of it was messed up.

I followed Kira across the building, hoping she, or it, knew what she was doing.

"Where are we going?" I tried to ask Keira multiple times, but she kept silent on that one. Actually, she'd stopped talking to me entirely. She didn't even look behind me to see if I was keeping up with her.

The things that were displayed were weird: almost all the stuff I'd never seen before, and had no clue how they worked. Things like transparent phones, green bracelets, one of those Google Glasses.

I remembered the first time I'd encountered an IPhone: it had terrified me. Now, looking at this new junk, that looked like it had been outdated for so long now, I was feeling desperate to either take and mess around with all these machines, or the more sane thing to do: run.

The other people seeing the sights were weird: there were about seventy something other people at this museum, but I didn't know a single one of them. They looked like normal residents, just casually browsing, but there was something off about them. All of them had some kind of gloves on, blocking the front of their hands from my vision. They all were completley silent, no little chatting, no saying things like: "Oh, sorry." or "Excuse me, please."

Occasionally, I'd get a view of one of their backs, and I'd see another barcode. It'd have the word "MODEL", the persons' full name, the number 1.0, and some number anywhere between 9,000 and 9,500. That went to prove one thing: none of them were actually human.

But the worst most importantly, the stares these robots gave: everywhere I walked, people gave me blank stares. Sometimes, they'd say exact the same thing. They said it so many times, I eventually memorized it in my head:

"Link Communication fail-ure. Report-ing error to WorldBrain."

I didn't know what it meant back then, but I was already in big trouble, just by joining Kira in wherever she was headed.

So why was I still following this machine?

Because, you need answers. The voice in my head replied. You wake up in a display case, apparently in a museum, and you have no idea how you got here or who any of these people are. She seems like the only sane one out of these robots, so if you're lucky, she'll make everything clear again.

Finally, after walking with her for nearly an hour, Kira stopped. In front of us was a glass, cylindar-shaped elevator.

I was impressed. "Nice elevator."

"Install-ing hu-man mod-e." Keira replied. "Thanks, but it's not mine."

"So, where to?" I took the oppurtunity to try to talk to her.

She stepped inside, and I quickly did the same. "Sixty-eighth floor. There's something I want to check out, and you're coming with me."

Then-whoosh. We were going directly up, at the speed of light. Everything around us became a blur, and I could actually hear a sonic boom. I had no idea elevators could go that fast!

I stumbled, banging my head against the glass. It wasn't that much, but it was enough to make me black out for about fifteen seconds.

----

Voices. All of them mixed together.

I listen to the voices, acting like music inside of my head.

"It's 2114." Keira.

"That's impossible." Ethan.

"We're not going down without a fight." Maddie.

"We have to find them." Me.

Then one final voice, I had no clue who it belonged to, was clearer than the rest.

"When your world moved on, it left us right here..."

"Trevor..."

"And you forgot about us."

"Trevor..."

"But. WE ARE STILL HERE."

Those four words bounce around in my head, through the voices of so many people. It is a chant, echoing across the walls of my mind. WE ARE STILL HERE. WE ARE STILL HERE. WE ARE STILL HERE.

They are still here.

"TREVOR!!!!"

"They are still here!" I exclaimed, sitting straight up.

Kira was staring at me blankly. "What?"

We were still in the glass elevator, but I was on my hands and knees. We'd made it to the sixty-eighth floor.

"I am never taking you on an elevator ever again." She said, stepping out.

"Kira, wait!" I got off my feet, racing after her. Okay. Now it was time for the questions. "What year is it?"

She spun around, the annoyed look she'd had since she got me out of the display case gone. In it's place was a look of terror. "It's 2114."

It's 2114. That one sentence took my breath away.

Some of the pieces that I had seemed to link themselves together, but not all of them. That explained so much! All of that new technology, the people acting like robots, and why I'd woken up in a display case.

I'd been asleep for a hundred years.