I was in the forest. I was dressed as Yughi, I could feel the easy idling power of his body, trained to physical perfection, but I was still me.
"What's going on?" I asked. "I'm not back."
"No," Paul's voice emanated from the sky above me. "This is the test program. See if you can catch the target."
"What target?" I asked. I needn't have bothered, the sleek form of a young buck deer came bounding past me. It stretched its legs and hopped easily between the trees, swiftly outstripping me.
"Run then, I'll restart," Paul said.
The deer flickered out of existence, there was a crunch of breaking twigs behind me and there it went again. As soon as I registered the beast I gave chase, even as I did I considered the stupidity of the test. There was no way a man on foot was going to catch up to a deer in the forest.
"Keep up as long as you can," Paul said as if reading my mind. "It will help me fine tune the loop."
So I kept running, as expected the deer began to outstrip me. To my surprise, though, it wasn't the pure speed in which the deer beat me, it was the animal's sure-footed progress through the trees.
After a short distance, the deer reached the edge of a long ridge. It stopped, momentarily and looked about. Swiftly I ducked behind the trunk of a tree, trying to remain as still and silent as I possibly could.
I reached into my mind, trying to activate the eagle sense that Yughi had, to my surprise it worked. Everything seemed to become louder, more detailed, the gentle tug of the slight breeze on my skin started to feel like a thin liquid passing across my skin. I even thought that I could smell the deer up ahead, a smell like hot, salty skin, slightly acid with panic.
I risked putting my head out to get a bead on the deer. It was looking the other way, uncertain, suspicious. Having got my bearings I found I didn't actually need to be looking at the animal with my eyes.
I heard it pick its way carefully down the steep ridge. It began to walk slowly away from my position. It was unsure where I was but it was not yet confident that I had gone away.
I slipped from behind one tree to another, after repeating this run and stop behaviour four or five times I happened upon a thicket of broad branched bushes I could use for cover. I crouched down into this stalking zone, keeping my senses alert to the deer nearby.
Following the creature further into the forest. I stayed elevated on the ridge whilst it trotted carefully along the lower floor. Before long I heard the soft babble of running water. I expected the deer to stop and drink as we reached the small stream but it didn't, instead, it followed the stream into a high walled pass between two rocks.
I had to break cover to follow it into the miniature valley. I made do with crouching and staying as quiet as I could. I was so intent on my quarry that when it suddenly unravelled in a cloud of wheeling white vector lines I caught my breath.
Reminding myself that the deer was just an asset in a computer simulation I crept closer to the point where it had unexpectedly disintegrated. I could tell that there was something wrong here, this part of the simulation was not rendered quite the same way as the rest of the forest. It was as if this part was a graft hastily added into the training programme.
I debated whether I should continue, I looked behind me although I don't know what I expected to find. There were no clues as to how I should proceed. I supposed that if I were to ask a question out loud then Paul would hear it. For some reason, I didn't.
I crossed the disintegration point. Nothing happened to me except my ears popped. After they popped I could hear a low digital tone that rose and fell, sprinkled with the barely audible sound of digital pops and chimes. I imagined that this was some kind of base state for the animus poking through this hastily assembled annexe to the main simulation.
My curiosity burning in my chest I walked forward into the area and quickly discovered the entrance to a dark cave tunnel winding round to the right. Small swatches of orange played against the wall on the left-hand side. A fire burned here.
I carefully crept up to the corner of the passage and peered around into the cave. A man sat by the fire on a low bench, reading a book. He did not appear to be armed.
I moved forward slowly, into the cave.
"Sam?" the man asked, sensing my presence, "is that you?"
"Who are you?" I asked back. "How do you know my name?"
"Get ready to have your mind blown," the man said. "My name is Ezekiel Cage, most people call me Zeke. I'm your brother."
"My what?" I said. I didn't know I had a brother, although this was not impossible, after all, I was an orphan who had been adopted out shortly after I was born.
"I was slightly older than you when mum and dad died," Zeke said. "So I knew you were out there, somewhere. When I was captured by Abstergo I knew they might come for you too, so I had a friend of mine help me out with this," he gestured around at the cave.
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"I hope you're asking me questions," Zeke said. "This is really no more than a sort of interactive presentation that advances whenever you say something. It's not much but it's all we had time for. Also, it's all we could hide in the boot ROM chip for the animus."
"Go on," I said, prompting presentation-Zeke.
"Anyhow, I haven't got much time so I'll tell you what I know. Recently the Assassins and the Templars got into some almighty battle over a guy called Desmond Miles. Desmond had some ancestral key to the Templars' grand designs."
As Zeke spoke a ray of golden light appeared to project upwards from the fire in the centre of the room. A picture of a young man with brown hair and a broad, handsome face appeared in mid-air, like a holographic projection.
"You remember that massive power outage in December 2012? Apparently, that was the apocalypse. The files I've read indicate that Miles lost his life saving the earth with some massive device under the earth in New York State."
The holograph display showed pictures of a giant cave, much larger than the one I stood in now, it was filled with strange blocky columns ranging back for about a quarter miles. The columns appeared to be decorated with straight lines picked out in luminous blue.
"It was the assassins that put together the team that saved the earth. When Desmond died it was as an assassin making a sacrifice for all mankind. Don't get the impression, though, that this makes the assassins into the good guys."
The holograph changed showing a number of different hooded figures in a variety of historical settings. I wasn't much for history so I couldn't tell you where many of them were although I swear I saw the pyramids in one of them.
"The fact is," Zeke continued, "that the two sides are in opposition, fundamentally opposed in philosophy and intention. The Assassins believe in freedom for all men, so they tend to get the popular vote over the authoritarian Templars and... Well, Abstergo, the corporate arm of the Templars, and the single largest Templar entity on the face of the planet at this time is pure evil through and through. That makes them no more than a mega-corporation when you break it down."
The holographic display showed a bunch of historical images showing Templars, and, later on, some pictures of Abstergo premises and personnel. Zeke's lecture picked up again.
"Both organisations have splinter cells, people who've broken from the core of the larger organisation. It's traditionally been a difficult life, these people know about assassins and Templars but don't identify as either and are regarded as enemies by both."
The holography showed a bunch of news footage of things like farmhouse sieges and anti-cult literature. I recognised a couple of the incidents from the news, famous bloody government cluster fucks, or so I'd always believed.
"That all changed after the Miles incident. To save the world the assassins essentially gutted themselves. There are only about two hundred 'pure' assassins left in the world now. There are three times more in splinter groups scattered across the globe. Put it all together and the assassin's movement would only, at maximum, number maybe 700 people over the entire globe. The Templars are technically doing a lot better in terms of numbers."
In the display a number of non-descript buildings that appeared to hold the offices of badly named import/export businesses or weird religious organisations or badly funded charities gave way to giant corporate rallies, conferences attended by thousands, footage of corporate drones doing busy work in a hive of work pens.
"The thing is about 95% of Templar agents don't even know they're working for the Templars. If you could isolate and cut off the head of that particular snake the beast would die, or at least lose its soul. There are really only about 250 people who push the pure Templar agenda in the modern age. If the assassins could unite, organise and execute a good enough plan the knowledge of the Templars could die, forever."
The display flickered out.
"The problem is," Zeke concluded. "That the remaining pure assassins are caught up in panic, the splinter groups are too wounded by pointless combat and mistrust. If the assassins are to defeat their enemy forever they will have to be swift and decisive, under the current leadership that just isn't happening.
"As you may have guessed I am working for one of these splinter groups, mostly consisting of electronic experts we operate under the cloak of a hacker group calling ourselves The Bartol Perspective, we've participated within the activities of Anonymous and similar hacktivist movements, we don't advertise our presence.
"I had this small program inserted into the ROM of all animus motherboards, it responds to our shared genetic markers only, so I can always find this cave and anyone related to me can. No one else would even know this was here. So there's only one person on earth I can ever see watching this other than me, and that's you, Sam.
"Come find me, you may not know who else you can trust, hell, I wouldn't be surprised if you didn't trust me but I am your brother and I promise you I will keep you safe. I left you some more stuff that will bury itself in any ancestor simulation that you step into. You can access it with this bracelet.
"Now you'd better take it and get out of here. Once this program has run you will have the option of activating a tracer program that will tell me where you are so I can contact you. If you decide that you would like to take advantage of that just leave the fire burning. Otherwise, stamp it out before you leave."
Zeke fell silent, holding out the bracelet he was offering me. The presentation over he became still as a statue, he no longer looked real. I studied his face, every line, his clear hazel eyes that looked like mine, the nose we shared, the weird downturn on the right end of our mouths. There was little doubt he was a relative but did I trust him?
Did I trust Helen and Paul? Not so much, I think they would get extremely uptight if I tried to leave. Did I trust Abstergo? Absolutely not. If I was going to run anywhere why not to the brother I never knew I had?
At the same time, how was I to assess the truth of anything this stranger had said? He called me by name, he looked like he could be my brother, but that was all I had to go on.
I looked down into the dirty embers of the camp fire and pictured myself stamping the fire out with my boot. Then I would have to locate him if I so chose. Was I confident that I could manage that? I was not. I suspected that the assassins' only virtue over the Templars when it came to my safety was that the assassins currently wanted me alive, whereas the Templars didn't much care.
This man had reached out to me and offered me safety. I so desperately wanted that safety, I so desperately wanted to feel connected to someone, to feel as if I was wanted. I had to do a pretty harsh mental calculation in that instant about what the stranger had to gain by lying to me.
The answer was nothing. All I was worth was the arcane knowledge coded in my genes.
The sudden notion flitted across my mind that this could be a Templar trick. Maybe the tracer program would run if I left the fire burning sending them a signal to come after me.
Then, I thought, why would they give me an option, even the illusion of an option. If the Templars had a way of getting this animus to call home then it would already have been activated. No need for this light show and unfair tug on my heartstrings.
I walked away from the fire, leaving it burning. Either nothing would happen, in which case, big deal. Or something would happen, in which case, my situation couldn't worsen in many ways and this did not seem to be a way to access any of those.
Hoping I was right I walked back out of the cave and returned to the main part of the simulation.
"You okay there?" Paul asked.
"Yes, I'm fine. I think I lost the deer though," I replied.
"The readings all went a bit fluttery there for a couple of seconds. Maybe it was a system glitch."
"Maybe," I said.
"Anyway I think that's all fine, the readings appear to be mostly much more stable," he said, sounding as if he was only half talking to me and mostly talking to himself. "You can come out for a bit if you want, or I can just send you straight back to the main simulation. There are indicators that a whole new block of memories has opened up, your synchronization is excellent."
"Then put me in," I said. "No sense in wasting time." In actual fact I just didn't want to look at their faces again, wanted the option to think about something other than my own fate for a while. The forest disassembled about me and, in a few seconds, a different scene assembled out of the grey mist. I could feel my own consciousness sink below the surface as I rejoined my medieval ancestor in Sherwood Forest.