Wrong Identity

When his systems flickered back to life, it wasn't with a gradual boot sequence. It was a violent snap.

"Wake up, sunshine. You’ve been out for three hours, and you're leaking coolant on my rug."

The voice was gravelly, sounding like a shovel scraping over dry pavement. Curtis’s eyes snapped open, but the image that greeted him wasn’t the grey sky of the Gorge or the golden haze of the blast. Instead, he was staring at a ceiling composed of yellowed acoustic tiles, one of which was curling at the corner like a dead leaf. He tried to sit up, and a sharp, electric spike shot through his lumbar servos, pinning him back down. He wasn't in a vault or a fissure. He was lying on a mattress that smelled of old tobacco and industrial detergent, in a room that felt small, stale, and suffocatingly quiet.

He rolled his head to the side. A man sat in a mismatched armchair by the window, wearing a canvas jacket that had seen better decades. He was watching Curtis with an expression of detached curiosity, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. The man didn't look like a recovery agent; he looked like a relic.

"Where..." Curtis started, but his voice was a fractured rasp. He reached for the memory of the blast, the image of the falling drones, the feeling of Soren’s hand on his shoulder—but the memories felt like wet ink on a page, blurring and running the moment he tried to focus on them. There was a gap, a cavernous void where the last few hours, or perhaps days, should have been.

"Take it slow," the man said, not moving from his chair. "You hit the ditch behind the diner like a fallen satellite. I’ve seen a lot of drifters pass through Oakhaven, but you’re the first one who came in humming a tune that made my fillings ache."

Curtis ignored the comment, his focus narrowing on the small, plastic ID card resting on the nightstand. He reached for it, his movements jerky and uncoordinated, as if his mind were sending signals through a frayed wire. He flipped it over. "Elias Thorne". The name sent a jolt through his processors—not a digital match, but a visceral, emotional echo. Julian Thorne had been the blueprint, the man whose life and likeness had been stolen to create him. But Elias? The name felt like a ghost, a shadow of a relationship he shouldn't have known.

"Who is Elias?" Curtis rasped, his voice sounding foreign to his own ears.

The man in the canvas jacket finally stood, the floorboards groaning under his weight. He walked toward the nightstand and leaned over, his eyes scanning Curtis with a clinical, yet oddly kind, intensity. "Didn't say a word when I found you. Just gripped that piece of plastic like it was the only thing keeping you tethered to the earth. You've got a way of holding onto things, kid. Most people in your position would've let go of everything the second they hit the dirt."

"I don't know where I am," Curtis said, his voice stronger now, though still laced with a tremor. He looked around the room, searching for any sign of a struggle, a bag, a clue. There was nothing but a small, stained towel on the floor and a small television that hummed with a low-frequency buzz. "How did I get here? Who brought me in?"

The man finally stepped into the room, the floorboards groaning under his boots. He didn't look like a threat, but his presence was an oppressive weight in the small space. "Found you face-down in the ditch behind the diner. You were shivering so hard I thought you were having a seizure. I'm the night manager here—though 'manager' is a generous term for someone who mostly just makes sure the pipes don't freeze. I dragged you in because the alternative was letting the coyotes have a snack."