Jordan stared at the empty desert in front of him uneasily. Somewhere, far beneath the surface of the desert, he could feel the enormous automaton stirring restlessly as it sensed the rise of a technological civilization.
Ever since Heidi had brought him and his three squad members back from the dead, he had been able to feel things that weren't there. He could feel the invisible currents of energy coursing through the world in concentric grid lines as he crossed over them, as well as the trapped souls of those who died near them. He knew that he had nearly become one of those trapped souls. The thought of going back to the sightless world of cold and foreign sensation filled him with stark terror. A permanent death would be better than the incomprehensible nightmare that awaited those who died near grid lines. The spark of life Heidi had breathed back into him had forever earned his allegiance.
In addition to the new ability to sense the energy grids, he could also feel what Heidi had told them were fourth and fifth dimensional entities. He would never have imagined just how crowded the world really was, before attaining his heightened senses.
At first, the other entities were just impressions on reality, like lighting artifacts in pictures, but visible all of the time. The more accustomed he became to his new sight, the more form the entities took on. He had never tried LSD, but he imagined that this must be what it was like. There was no set form to any of the entities; they seemed to morph from one moment to the next for reasons Jordan couldn't begin to understand.
There was also a strange—information layer—that seemed to overlay everything in the other dimension. Captions would often appear near the entities, labelling them with titles or descriptions. He often wondered if they were his mind's way of translating information that his subconscious understood on a fundamental level.
As a former data analyst, which was the NSA's word for hacker, he had spent enough time studying the future of augmented reality to suspect that the real world was some kind of complex computer simulation. He knew there were dozens of front corporations with the same belief, and that they spent vast resources trying to hack the source code of the simulation. He who cracked the source code of the simulation would become a god, or so the powers behind the research believed. They had quickly discovered that the limited understanding they had of programming was so primitive that they were like toddlers learning to play with a parent's smartphone, smashing it against the ground to try and understand what made it work.
Only a few groups had moved past smashing the phone to actually exploring the source code through human consciousness experiments. The data Jordan had found on the methods used to explore the boundaries of human consciousness were enough to make even a hardened mercenary empty his stomach. Those methods had, however, provided the most success in accessing new realms, and in some cases, actually changing isolated portions of the source code, sometimes with disastrous results.
It had been nearly a decade since a project he had found on a data farm owned by Bell Innovations had revealed just how destructive some of the mistakes had been. While many people believed the rise in autism and other psychological disorders were due to environmental toxins or vaccines, the truth was far more radical. In their attempt to add some of their own code to the simulation and change some aspects of human history, they had inadvertently changed what they called 'fourth state mappings' which affected tens of millions of individuals who were connected to that particular mapping node. In addition to creating an aberration in the fourth state mapping, they had created what many people in the world thought of as altered timelines as a result of people remembering events differently on a collective scale.
Attempts to remove the inserted code had resulted in even more fractured memories. They had not factored in that the simulation was not regulated by static code, like a computer operating system. It was controlled by artificial intelligences of far greater complexity than anyone could comprehend, pulling their inserted code deep into the simulation and then integrating it throughout with its own nuances added.
With a sigh, Jordan got out of his utility truck and began unloading the large trailer. He had an observatory to set up. There was no point in wasting any more time on the past. In his new life, he saw Heidi as one of the people who must have successfully hacked the source code at some time in the past. Whatever else happened, he would follow her to the end, and hope that she had better answers to offer than the reckless scientists of the twenty-first century.