The Travels of Draconis Teine Part 1

I don’t know where to begin. It’s like on TV, or in the movies, when you see police conducting an interview, they say start at the beginning. What I always wondered was, what is the beginning? I mean, take my absurd situation. Was the beginning my pleasant childhood, which progressed into struggling teen years where my mental health issues began to appear? The years attempting to get through college, or the bad decisions of an ill mind compounded by an inability to stay structured enough to do the work necessary to earn my degree, the spontaneous marriage to a mentally abusive wife whose secret job of running a pornographic website, where all the videos involved her and her affairs, that I stumbled upon leading to cracking of my frail mental health.

Or was it after my subsequent divorce from that fucking bitch? No I can’t hold that resentment. It’s unhealthy. That’s what I learned when I got the help I needed, and it allowed me to return to school and complete my schooling with a computer degree. The job as a programmer with a startup tech company led by Ivan Polistic, a neuroscientist. The loss of the job when some of the investors mismanaged the finances, bankrupting the company.

No, I suppose that was everything that molded me into the person I am today but wasn’t the beginning that those officers would be looking for. Instead, they would be more interested in Ivan contacting me some time later with a job offer at a big tech company that was interested in a specific project that I was essential for. The project was based on his research and I had written most of the code that ran it all. The project was the development of a program that could connect to the brain and teach it.

The big tech company gave us the ability to test the theory and coding. For a number of years we ran several tests on varying test subjects, but had not reached any kind of human trial. We had also seen no adverse effects to any of the subjects, which made me excited and ready to volunteer myself as the first test subject. In order to make it easy to check the results, we debated on what I was to learn. That was when inspiration struck me: teach me swordplay. It seemed like such a simple idea and was definitely not something I had learned, though I had some badass ideas of what it would be like, all of it from movies and my love of video games.

Wired up, I slipped into darkness. I didn’t know what to expect. I only knew what we thought happened and honestly it was pretty spot on. I could see in my mind the program running as images of sword movement processed into my mind. The parry movements. The deflections. The dodging. The thrusts and slices. It was all as we had coded into the program. I could even feel my muscles twitching and changing as they developed “muscle memory.” It was an amazing feeling. I was pleasantly surprised at how well the program worked. Then things went awry.

The program started skipping. Glitching and pixelation overran the images. Pain surged through my body. My mind screamed. It was excruciating. Then suddenly it ceased. There was nothing for what seemed like an eternity before consciousness crept back.

And that, officer, is how I ended up laying flat on my back, naked, and staring up at the blue sky that held a hint of purple in it.