Hybrid .4 (Book One of The Upgrade Trilogy)

I'm Taking Back Control

Nothing.

There was nothing.

I'd always expected when you died, you'd go to the Heavens, or the Afterlife, or wherever dead people went.

Nope. There was no overlord, no man in a ferry, no introduction to death.

Nobody was there to greet me, except a cold, black void.

As I fell, I tried to regain consciousness. I wanted to scream, pound on the walls, feel pain.

Anything besides just sitting and waiting. But I couldn't. Could anyone hear me?

You know the phrase: "life flashing before your eyes"? Well, that was happening to me. Images of people I didn't recognize, events I didn't remember. My life story, and all I did was pretend it wasn't there.

Why?

....I don't know.

You see, when I was lying there in the infinite black, my mind had gone away entirely. I couldn't remember where I was, or how I got there. It was this part of me that felt...empty.

Yet, for some weird reason, that emptiness didn't matter.

Nothing mattered.

It was so....calm.

My eyelids began to close. My breaths came to a cease. And my body became numb, as I drifted away for good.

Stuck in darkness.

Forever.

Or at least, it should've been forever.

"Trevor, wake up."

My eyes flew open, as a hand shook me awake. "Wh-what?"

It was Kyle. His clothes were white, and his hair was pulled back into a ponytail. Seeing him made me hope that everything from the car accident, to Danny bringing in the vestigivore had just been a dream, but that hope flickered when I saw the glum look on his face.

"Where are we, Kyle? What happened?" I sat up, trying to keep the answers to a minimum.

"A lot of stuff, my friend." Kyle held his hand out. "We're in Millgrove, my hometown."

I took his help, and got to my feet. "Never heard of it."

"It wasn't that big. It's nearby Cambridge, or New Cambridge, as they call it now." He explained.

There wasn't a lot of life signs I could see. "Where are all the people?"

"I'm not sure." Kyle inhaled, his British accent making it sound sharp. "C'mon, I'll show you to where my place used to be."

He started heading off. I followed him, trying to ignore the feeling of stress in my stomach.

We walked for about five minutes, a new low for traveling with Kyle, until he stopped dead in his tracks.

A crowd of 1.0, I mean like, a swarm of them, were standing outside one of the houses, with their backs to us. They were surrounding the home, and holding up their different machines.

"....Mister Straker! We have a couple of questions for you!" An interviewer was screaming.

"Are the Straker tapes real, or fake?!" Someone shrieked.

"Do you really have a son named Kyle Straker?" Someone else demanded to know.

"Where is this young man now?" A third person yelled.