Project: Psynapse

Clamoring glasses distracted any hope that Luna had from hearing who was performing on stage. One drink after another after another after another on a long and snowing Monday night. Again. At the bar.

“Man… I wish I could get a shot”

Luna sighed as she looked at the stage with hopeful eyes, an empty glass in one hand, and a tarnished towel in the other.

She didn’t bother to collect the tip she was staring to as she began to wash the stack of sticky glass that had been accumulating. She couldn’t be bothered. It would all just end up in the register anyway…

“What a calamity”, Luna incessantly said silently to herself among the din that engulfed her, hunched in front of the sink underneath the bartop.

“See what currency brings?”, said a voice in front of her.

Luna looked up, but nobody was there. She raised an eyebrow in confusion. She shook her head to brush off the moment, and quickly checked the time on her phone as she caught it changing from 9:14 to 9:15.

At that moment someone walked through the front door. They were dressed in a black overcoat and a hood that was covered in freshly fallen snow. A scarf was wrapped tightly around their face, and they had a bag hanging off their shoulder. They lowered their hood and started taking off the scarf as they made way to the bar where Luna was washing glasses.

“Whiskey. Double time. And make it rock.”

Luna looked at the gentleman standing in front of her and nodded. The snow on his overcoat was beginning to melt as she grabbed a clean glass, filled it with ice, and poured a double of Makers Mark.

She slid the sweating glass to the man where there was a fresh ten waiting for her to take.

“Got a name stranger?”, Luna asked.

The man took the perspiring glass, jostled the ice, and slowly put it up to his lips as he eyed Luna.

“You can call me Junior”, and then took a significant sip of his drink.

“Never seen you here before Junior”, Luna said with a curl as she went back to washing the glasses.

“I’m here on official business.”

“Yeah? Wha—” Luna looked back up to answer but there was no one there. She looked at the whiskey and money sitting barely touched above the bar. She quickly scanned the entire room in confused collected distress, and asked one of the patrons sitting a few stools down if they had seen where the man went.

“I dunno Luna.”, said the patron in a voice that sounded like it shouldn’t be driving home. “Maybe the door guy kicked him out or something hehe.”

“Heh… Yeah… I guess -”, Luna looked back at where Junior was standing. The whiskey in the glass was completely gone, the ten dollar bill was gone and replaced with singles, and now, there was also a decent sized package there.

She stood there stunned, looking at the package. Then, she approached slowly, scanning the room for any resemblance of the person she had just been introduced to while reverberant piano music continued from the stage in the next room.

She stopped in front of where the package sat on the bartop. She continued to stare until the ice in the glass settled and broke her concentration. She took the glass to the sink, cleaned up the puddle it left on the bartop, and examined the package closer. There was a small blue note on the top:

“Care Of: Luna M. Ramy”

Luna looked around, looked back down at the package with her name on it, and with a bit of hesitation, began to unwrap it, and once she finished, a unopened cell phone was sitting there. She unsealed the box, took out the device and turned it over. There was another note:

“Power Up”

Luna squinted, considered the scene for a second, and after another wince held the button on the side to turn on the device. The screen lit with an embellished ‘P’ logo, and immediately shut back off.

“What the -”, Luna didn’t even get out a next breath when she heard a horrific, terrible scream coming from all angles of all sides of her! Her eyes widened in horror. She darted her head and eyes all over the room to see if anyone else was hearing. Nobody seemed phased! The scream! It was so loud and earsplitting she couldn’t hear anything else. Running to the other room, she checked to see if there was still anything happening on the stage. The pianist was still playing, but she couldn’t hear them. Only the screaming! It kept growing in volume. Luna thought her ears were going to start bleeding.

Then, she felt a tremendous pressure inside her skull. She went up to the doorman to try and ask if he could hear anything. The doorman put his hand up in reassurance and started talking to Luna. Luna could see the doorman’s lips moving, but couldn’t hear him.

As Luna was trying to read the doorman’s lips, she heard a voice start talking to her as if there was a halo of sound above her head, even though the screaming hadn’t stopped.

“The voice isn't what's important.

It's not the words.…

It's the feeling.…

Feeling..... Translating it is my job. Among too many others.

Lately, the language has become obscure, and patronized.

And everything is so loud.…

These works.... have consumed me.

It's all I know.

My only language....

Spirits are not meant to be… seen… For visualization takes an incredible amount of energy.

For a spirit to be seen visually by one person, even for a split second,

takes a tremendous amount of very specialized energy.

Forget having to be seen by dozens.

If a spirit wants to be seen for visual purposes, it will have already left its mark,

before you even knew it was there.…

For an image - every blink of an eye, is worth a thousand words.

That being said.... In this day and age.... Too many pictures. Too many images.

Seen by too many people.

Equals… Too many words.

By too many people.

And as you scroll...... And consume thousands of words in a second,

other peoples words,

from other peoples frame,

in the blink of an eye,

and you think....

Why can't those be your words.…

But most of them don't even make sense anymore.

And now... It seems humans are just running out of words.

Its the same angles.

From the same lenses.

All the time.

When did scroll become a verb?

The thought makes you not want to blink too much…”

At that moment Luna had fainted on the floor and hit her head. She heard the doorman yell out for someone to call an ambulance. She opened her eyes briefly to see a haze of at least a dozen people standing over her trying to use their phones, and each one of them looked concerned as they were frantically trying to get their devices to turn on.

Luna heard the doorman yell at the top of his lungs: “DOES ANYONE IN THIS PLACE HAVE A PHONE THAT FREAKING WORKS?!” and then she fully collapsed on the floor.

When Luna came to, she was laying face up watching the ceiling above her roll backwards like a treadmill. After a couple confused blinks, she noticed an IV held in place by two crossed pieces of medical gauze on her wrist.

A nurse pushing the bed Luna was laying in noticed her opened eyes.

“Hey! Glad your awake.”

Luna looked at the nurse, “Where are we going? H- How did I get here?”

“Doctor ordered an MRI. One of your co-workers drove you here. They said you looked really scared and just passed out on the floor. They tried to call an ambulance but it looks like there’s a massive cell outage. Nobody has a working phone right now. In fact, your lucky we could get you seen this fast… We are the only hospital in the county that doesn’t rely on a cellular patient logging system. We haven’t been able to keep up with the demand!”

Luna gave a slow blink. “R- really? That’s weird… How long ago did I get here?”

The nurse kept looking ahead as they pushed the bed and answered Luna, “Three days ago.”

“I’ve been passed out for three days!?”, Luna panicked weakly.

“Like I said… You’re lucky we could get you seen this quickly.”, said the nurse with a darker expression. “We have your things for safekeeping. We’ll bring you back to your room after we finish an MRI. The doctor just wants to rule out any sudden anomalies that might have caused you to black out like that. Has this type of thing ever happened to you before?”

“No… Uh… Never. I don’t even get headaches… I was just st-”, before Luna could finish speaking her thought, the nurse had pushed the bed through a set of doors leading to the imaging room where the loud rhythmic whir of the MRI machine was waiting.

“Nothing metal or magnetic right? We removed all of your jewelry and didn’t notice any other piercings. We took note of the tattoo on your leg as well.”

It was only then Luna noticed she was wearing nothing but a blue hospital gown, and in a candid starstruck demeanor she got up and laid down on the MRI table blankly saying, “No… Nothing more…”

“Okay”, said the nurse. “Put these headphones on. Lenore is going to be your technician. This won’t take very long.”

Luna put on the plastic transparent headphones and took a deep breath as the table started to shift her into the machine. Through the headphones she heard the technician speaking to her.

“Okay Luna, your going to hear a lot of loud noises for about ten minutes okay. Just stay as still as you can.”

Luna heard the MRI revving up to speed. The spinning magneto started to buzz in pulses as the machine began the imaging process.

A few minutes into the scan, Luna heard a voice talking to her not from the headphones, but seemed like it was emitting from inside the MRI machine.

“Agent148 - We just met.

There is something that you don't know.

Agent039, or as you know them, Junior is not who.... or what... you think.

I have been watching what they have been subject to from behind this glass, but I fear I am powerless within this realm of reflection.

There is only one way that you can successfully complete your mission, and possibly end this madness once and for all.

I have attached a marked map of our location.…”

The next thing Luna knew she was laying sitting up in a bed in her hospital room. The doctor was there talking to her with a computer cart that had images of the MRI on the screen. Here wide eyes darted between the doctor and the screen as she sat there in a confused daze.

“So your brain map looks normal Luna, we don’t see anything abnormal in the MRI. We are going to keep you until morning for observation just to make sure, but I think you were just severely dehydrated, and maybe stressed out from work. You must take better care of yourself, but I’m glad your okay. If you have any more questions, don’t be afraid to ask the nurse. They’ll be in to take the cart and bring you tonight’s dinner. If there’s an emergency, just push the button by your bed there.”

The doctor pointed to a button attached to a wire tied around the hospital bed she was laying in.

The doctor then got up and left the room.

Luna kept her focus on her MRI on the screen. She noticed the multicolor image of her brain scan, and from the distance, she saw what looked like a pattern that almost resembled an Egyptian eye.

It was at that moment the nurse came, turned off the screen, and started wheeling out the computer cart.

“Yeah… These bulky things. But it’s all we have right now. The tablets we usually bring to the bedside are all affected by the outage.”

“I- I’m sorry…. What is this outage?”

“Yeah I guess you’ve been out for awhile… Nobody knows what happened, but all cell phones and devices just stopped working the other day. It’s been almost four days now and nobody knows what's going on. I would have thought it was some crazy terrorist attack, but it’s literally every deice around the entire world. You’re lucky your here, because everyone out there is losing their absolute sh-”, the nurse dropped the computer keyboard and a few keys exploded across the floor. “Gah! Sorry…”, said the nurse as they were picking up the broken keyboard. “Jeeze… Computers they said. Easier lives they said. Somebody will bring you your dinner soon.”, and the nurse wheeled the computer cart out in a huff.

Luna noticed her clothes and belongings on the side-table next to her bed. On top of her things was the phone she had opened from the bar. She ignored it and turned on the TV where it was already stationed to the news.

“…as we are currently reporting on this developing story. We’ll be right back.”

The TV went to commercial.

“What is going on?”, said Luna out loud to herself. Someone walked in and put a food platter on the bed tray, wheeled it over Luna’s bed, and left.

Luna removed the platter cover; Spaghetti, a carton of milk, an apple, and a brownie.

The news returned from commercial on the TV. “A worldwide investigation is currently being conducted on the sudden and economy collapsing cellular outage that is currently effecting every corner of the world. Some officials and activist groups are blaming climate change and shifting geomagnetic polls. Others are calling it an act of terror. Psychologists are calling this epidemic one of the worst human-kind may ever know.”

As the news cut to footage of crowds rioting and looting all over the globe, Luna shook her head, went to pick up the plastic fork next to her meal to try and eat, and accidentally bumped the apple off the table.

“Dang it!” puffed Luna as she watched the apple bounce off the bed and onto the floor. She tracked the apple as it rolled and eventually stopped where the nurse had dropped the computer keyboard not 15 minutes ago. There were some keys still scattered there on the floor. Luna looked at the keys next to where the apple had stopped.

U 1 ESC

Luna looked back at the phone from the bar. She slowly picked it up and examined it again.

Luna held down the power button, and all of a sudden, she found herself in a white empty space, still laying in the bed, and with the TV still on a wall in front of her. The news anchors were the same, but they seemed to be staring through the TV directly at Luna. They started a new report:

“A universal neural network has been compromised.

A few years ago, Agent039 was activated to assist in the re-structuring of corrupted data-streams in an effort classified as – Project: Psynapse.

Project: Psynapse was originally closed and declared a catastrophic failure, after sensitive mission intel was intercepted by inside actors. Angent039 was held hostage and subject to the… darker-side of our research…

And we didn’t know enough about our own machine to make it stop…

The traitor who compromised Agent039 did not realize that the research was not yet completed…

Or Perhaps they did…

Recently, new intel has begun to lead us to a compromised outpost Agent039 is currently occupying.

Though we have ‘successfully’ tracked this lead, an issue remains;

An other-dimensional being, the size and scale of which are still unknowable and unfathomable, has been summoned due to the activation of an unfinished meta-machine built on stolen plans deep within our archives, and there was much more research to be done in order to ensure safety and stability of a fully assembled and powerful system, if it were ever to be built in the first place...

They believed this technology would have given them the ultimate upper hand, power, and control… however, what they activated, what they inadvertently summoned may destroy – us – all…

Agent039 was the only one with the information we needed to even begin to try and stop that atrocity from reaching this, and every other conceivable universe, galaxy, and timeline simultaneously. We report this with fear, as this information is in fact classified as - actual.

Agent039 has become aware of their programming, and while that is not necessarily a logistical problem, further statistical analysis shows that if certain data-channels within the agent’s programming structure are not activated, it causes too much concentrated neural-pathway traffic, and we lose contact, and our agent goes rogue. In the meantime, all public and private cellular technologies have been deactivated until we can stabilize the neural traffic of Agent039.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to help uncover deeper insight within the mind of Agent039 so that we way try to understand how to properly execute an extraction.

It is a relatively simple task, and has been made to be enjoyably for you – Agent148, though you can opt-out at any time, and you may keep your assigned EDX device.

The only thing you need - is nothing.”

Luna then felt herself gasp a deep breath of air, and, now sitting back in the normal hospital room, she saw the silhouette of a familiar figure in the doorway. It spoke to her in a voice she recognized from the bar. “I thought I’d seen everything. And then I saw you. Was it only after you thought you saw everything you saw me?”