ok this is my VERY first attempt at some half life2 fiction. It weighs in at 3000 words...so ya know! :rolling: . Just wondered what you all think!! Thanks! :cheers:
"wake up dumb ass"
"urgh, ya what"
"move, look, its 9am, you know we have to be down the station before 10, come on, shift!"
Nicholas Rogers, 2nd Technician in charge of new arrivals , didn’t like mornings, In fact, mornings were his least favourite time of day that he could think of right at this moment, next to actually going to that hell hole.
His room mate Andrew Michelson, a tall man with a little less neck that you would expect on a person of such height, was already up and dressed for the long day ahead. Nick was just sitting on the edge of the bed rubbing the sleep away from his eyes, and trying to loose the thoughts that had minutes ago been racing through his now numb mind. He slowly and uneasily stood up, and stumbled across to an old chair where his uniform was kept. He slid in to his trousers, buckled up his Kevlar vest, and got Andrew to buckle up his helmet. Hungry, and still back in his bed, he strolled down to the security gate to swipe through in to the main city. Fumbling around in his creased trousers for his ID card, the guard now at the gate called his name out. Nick, who was more preoccupied with trying to find his ID didn’t realise that the guard was addressing him. Continuing to look for it, he felt a short stabbing pain in his side. The guard who was once sitting down, was now towering over him, with what looked like a police baton, only with blue light emanating from the end, stabbed in to nicks side. Quickly realising this was the source of the discomfort, he stood up to attention and looked at the guard. Again the guard said his name
"Nicholas Rogers"
"yes....ur Sir"
The tall guard called over to two colleagues who were chatting in the nearby corner, about what they had each "conquered" the previous night, but looked sharp when, who Nick assumed to be their superior called them over. With a small look at each of these guards, they both asked Nick to follow them. The two guards lead nick off through a sealed metal door, which required one of the guards to have his retina scanned to open. Andrew, standing there bemused at what had just happened, slowly removed the ID from around his neck, and swiped it though the card reader. The gate in front of him opened with a sharpness that emulated what was in front of him, the towering metal monstrosity that was the citadel. With a small look back at the guard, and the thought of asking what had just occurred, the guard at the gate, through his white combine soldier mask, simply shook his head. Andrew replaced his ID card back in to his holder and walked off towards the station with his unusual sprightliness for this time of the morning
"Do you know who I am Mr Rogers?" a frail, almost familiar voice spoke from what seemed the corner of a darkened room
"ugh, no.. NO SIR!" he replied
"Do you know, why you are here with me?" again spoke the same frail voice
"Urm, no idea sir" he replied
The voice now moved out in to an insubstantial light that was emanating from a small barred window. A frail looking man, with a gaunt face, and dark hair stood before Nick, wearing a dark blue suit, and in his hand a briefcase. The man slowly, but purposely lay the briefcase down on the table where Nick was resting most of his weight. With two clicks, the man unlocked his briefcase, and eagerly opened it. Slightly apprehensive at to what the man was going to remove from this, Nick watched eagerly as a pair of emaciated hands moved in to the case. As the hands withdrew, they had in their grasp a selection of photographs and also a CD.
"Do you know this man Mr Rogers?" spoke the unidentified man as he slid one of the photos across the table
"No Sir!" Nick replied with a sense of urgency in his voice
"I'm sorry allow me to rephrase my question Mr Rogers. Have you ever seen this man?"
"y...yes, I keep having thes..."
"Yes” The figure paused for a short while
“I know Mr Rogers, DREAMS! Dreams which make every nerve in your body scream when you think about them. These dreams terrify you don’t they? Dreams **chuckle** where the only thing more frightening than having them, is the thought that they could in fact come to pass!"
The two simply sat there for a moment, looking at each other. The suited man, although intimidating in his own right, did not seem to want to intimidate Nick. His general manner and attitude towards him was not that of authority, but of someone, wanting to learn. Minutes past and Nick became unnaturally occupied with a small chip on the edge of the clinical steel table that he was leaning on. That was it, he decided, he was going to break this silence, which felt unusually like the silence that you get when seeing an old friend
"Why have brought me here?" he asked the suited man calmly
" O, Mr Rogers, tut tut, I thought in our prolonged silent interlude, you would have had the chance to think about what has come to pass today?!"
Nicholas' eyes drifted off to the right of the table, and he was thinking about how he had gotten there. He was thinking about those pictures which he had been shown. They were of a man, inside a chamber, in a dimly blue lit room, standing upright. He knew the name of this man, he had seen it somewhere, but where?!! He sat there for another few minutes letting his mind take him where it felt like, which strangely enough was back to his safe bed...bed, that was it, he had seen this mans face in one of the dreams he had had. Not the one he had this morning, but many years ago, almost before all of his life had begun. He remembered now, he was 17...had been to a party with some friends, tried some drugs, and passed out upstairs. He had put it down to the drugs, the most amazingly real dream, it was like he was there.
"Ah!, I see the penny has dropped Mr Rogers"
The engulfing darkness was broken by the arrival of light in the room, not too bright, but all the same it hurt his eyes for a few seconds as they adjusted. The face of the man came in to a more solid light, Nick knew him, he, he was there chuckling in the corner of this blue lit room, where the man in the pictures was. Chuckling away as he sat and watched this man in the room. It was almost as if, he was taking some pleasure in the knowledge that this man was in this situation, by the sounds of his laugh. But, this man hadn’t aged. He looked the same as he did in the dream Nick had had almost 10years ago!
"I know you, you were……. you were in that room, the blue lit one, with this man" he said quickly as if itching to get it out
Nick picked up the closest of the pictures to him and showed it to the unnamed man who was now adjacent to him and sitting far more closely to the table than before.
"Well done Mr Rogers!, I believe....that I under estimated your cognitive ability. This is the reason you are here Mr Rogers. You see, the man you saw in your little dream all those years ago was a research scientist called Gordon Freeman. He survived..."
"The black mesa disaster" Nick interrupted
"I heard about a man surviving that, off some of the other soldiers down at the station, there’s rumours going around that.."
"Yes!, he is coming to City 17" interrupted the mysterious man, in a far more calm way than nick had
"I would be lying if I told you that you came here only to clarify a dream you had while under the influence of, drugs. See, Mr Rogers, there is far more to you, than meets the eye..." he started to chuckle after saying this, similar to the way Nick had remembered him chuckling in the room with Gordon.
Nick could feel something almost wanting to erupt from inside him, it was as if someone had opened the flood gates in his mind, he was seeing unexplainable things, aliens....another planet?, he was seeing death, death which he had only seen in his dreams.......then he saw the black mesa base being destroyed, and then the suited man again chuckling away with Gordon in the chamber. All of these dreams were real?
He started to doubt the sanity of his own mind, he was staring at the backs of his hands almost expecting to see something else there, as if in disbelief of what was unfolding in front of his eyes. The visions stopped. They stopped with the sound of screaming, screaming voices, of women, children and the heart wrenching cries of wounded souls laying in what looked like a war zone. It felt like his mind had just frozen, it was locked on the sound of this screaming, it was burrowing deeper in to his mind...the screams..
"MR ROGERS!, now that I have your full attention, I think I had better explain what is so special about you!"
“The Black mesa disaster was exactly that. Myself, and my, with want for a better word, Superiors did not want it to go as far as it did. We deeply regret that there was such a loss of life, but did not even expect the border world to invade earth.”
“Border world?” Nick said with some uncertainty in his voice
“The border world Zen. You have seen it, yes?
Nick through for a second, could this have been where that place was, it sure didn’t look like earth, nor did the creatures that inhabited it.
“As I was saying, we did not want it to go that far. A creature called the Nilinhath, decided that it was not happy with what we were using “its” planet for. So, with this in mind, it started to send swarms of troops to our world to stop what we were trying to accomplish”
The situation was stating to make more sense now. Nick was becoming very conscious of the wet feeling he now had under his armpits, and the amount of water that was coming out of his hands as he rubbed them together nervously.
“So…you, you were trying to use their planet for science?” he said with a quiver in his voice
“Yes…and no. We discovered an ore, from a meteor that landed on this planet many millennia ago. After much research, we found tit had properties that were simply unimaginable. Teleportation, cold fusion…we had only just scratched the surface of its potential…then”
The suited man, stopped for break, as if he was in some sort of pain. He removed a small glowing capsule from his briefcase, swallowed it, and continued with his speech
“Then, we attempted to go too far with the experiments. My superiors, had on the day of the black mesa disaster, sent me to the base to get updates on what progress the scientists had made, and also, “keep an eye” on one of the new recruits at the base, who coincidentally was Gordon. We were trying on that day, to send equipment through a portal to this border world, which would allow us to then “Hop” to other parts of the galaxy, from there”
Another silence swooped over the room. The two men simply sat there again, looking at each other. The suited mans once taught face, presumably from the pain, was now more relaxed. And he once again stood up.
“As I said earlier, I would explain what is so special about you. No, don’t interrupt me”
Nick wanted to ask his own question first, but he was not allowed to , as the man ensured that he carried on talking above him.
“Your father”
“my father died when I was 12”
“Yes, I knew him, he was one of our best scientists, h”
“he wasn’t a scientist, he worked at a software company, I saw where he worked!!”
“That is irrelevant right now. Your father was one of our top scientists. He was one of the first to help unleash the power of the ore we found. He was working on one of the samples that we had, when something, which looked similar to a bolt of lightning, hit him in the chest. He was knocked out for a considerable amount of time, but when he came around, after the medics had checked him out, he went back to work on the ore”
Nicks mind was falling back on itself. He had seen where his father worked; he had met some of his colleagues when he visited his work. He couldn’t understand. He assumed this man had no reason to lie to him, as all he had uttered so far was the truth.
“I remember something. He came home that night and wasn’t acting like he normally did at all. He went off in to the garage with some things he had brought back from work, and spent the whole night in there. I went down to see him at around 11pm..and he told me to leave him be. I went to give him a hug, and I cant remember what happened after that…except waking up in hospital and my mother telling me dad was dead”
His eyes filled up with tears as he thought of this. He quickly blinked to remove them
“Yes, the life form had passed on to you! You see, your father, had essentially died when the lightning had hit his body from the ore. But the life form which was trapped in the ore was essentially “hi-jacking” his body for its own means. Your father was building some sort of teleportation device in your garage that night, well when I say your father, I mean the life form, presumably so it could bet back to its own world. When you went in there, and tried to hug who you thought was your father, the life-form passed over in to you, un-intentionally of course, but it still did.”
“is it still inside me? Is it controlling me?”
“Yes and…no. Because it did not “want” to be moved over in to your body, and also your age at the time, only part of it got transferred to your mind. This is why you are so important, it has taken until now for your mind to develop fully, this is why your having these dreams!”
Confusion filled his mind, as he thought of more questions to ask this man. But he decided to stay quiet, and sat there patiently waiting for the man to continue talking
“This is the reason why you are here. You knew you would come here today didn’t you? You saw it in a dream. This morning and also this meeting between you and myself. You have seen it all!!, you have also seen how it all ends!!”
He had…he had seen the end, it was black, all black, but for one man, and, another man next to him. He could see them talking, but he did not know who either of them were.
“My superiors decided that we should have killed Gordon Freeman after the black mesa disaster. But, after much persuasion from myself, they did not, and decided that he could be very useful in our battle” The man paused for a second again and then continued
“I have also brought YOU to their attention, and yet again, they agree that you are equally as essential to our operation.”
The man was now becoming much more imposing. He had sit up and straightened his back and was looking at Nick with an uneasy smirk on his gaunt face.
“you want me to work with you??”
“YES!! Yes, Mr Rogers. Exactly that. You know of the citadel Mr Rogers. This is where you will now go.
Two portals now appeared in the room, one to the left of the table, and one to the right. They had a bright green and yellow glow to them that filled the room with light. The Man was now standing in the middle of the room and looking very menacing. He began to speak!
“To you left Mr Rogers is the portal that I suggest that you do not walk through, it leads only to somewhere you do not wish to be. I can tell you this because I have been there. It is in one word “hellish”. This portal on your right leads you to the citadel. This is the one I think you should walk through. It leads to a new life of importance. You can help us Mr Rogers, you know how this ends, and thus, how we can win it all! You are essential.”
He did not know what to do. Yes the man had said that this other place was hellish, but what did he mean. He simply had visions of a fiery place with a baron landscape and him on his own if he walked through that portal. So he walked towards the one to the right
“This is the one you want me to go through?” He asked again to make sure he wasn’t going through the wrong one
“Yes, I will meet you there after I have attended to some business. A well expected guest has just arrived on the first train of the morning”
Nick walked forward. He felt himself being pulled ever faster towards an unidentified point, then it was all black and a single black chair was in front of him. He sat down on this chair and layback, thank full for something more comfy than the wooden chair he had been sitting on.
“We are glad you made the right choice Mr Rogers. I think that you would also agree” Said a group of voices speaking in harmony, which sounded like they were all around him, watching, and waiting…
Well thats it. Thanks for reading, if you did. Please feel free to give any feedbacd