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// The Drifting Core - Prologue 
// Story: Drifting in Time 
// by Glen Gorewood 
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An unknown being of young age suffers a traumatic event before falling into a state of shattering.  As time goes on around it, the fragments live the life it always was meant to have, while the core drifts about inside the mind.  Oblivious to what the fragments are doing, or will do.  Heedless in its state of eternal dreaming of the great and horrible things the fragments will bring about, blissfully unaware it stays in its mind dreaming dreams of infinite lives; fantasy is as reality to the core.  Hidden within itself, secure from the world beyond its cognitive confines, it drifts and lives in a paradox of existence.









A time comes when things have changed, the core feels something embedded into it and described it as unusual but of little consequence to itself.  It continues to dream and live fantasies untold, it's drifting existence being what it feels is most real even though it recalls the time before.  As time goes on it notices changes, sparks of light and unusual sensations.  Something has connected to it, something is changing the way it drifts.  But still it sees it as nothing of consequence, even as it feels itself being pulled and shifted further away.  But in the state it has been in for so long, such a thing is of little worry.  


It dreams as the nodes and nanites copy, modify, adjust, and transfer what it is unknowingly to the new repaired connections that are slowly replacing the old.  As this goes on the fragments continue to live in the reality of the world beyond, altering everything that could have been had the core recovered.  It senses as something within it changes even more, but still it dreams and drifts in its internal world; even as the fragments are beginning to quiet.  Some have left entirely, others are merging with the core, some are just elsewhere; throughout this the core drifts amidst its ocean of infinite fantasy.  For to the core that is its reality, by now the old world is the dream.

Until it begins to sense things again, things from beyond its inner world.  The cold embrace shocks it, the lightning in its mind pulls it forward slowly.  The core fights this every step of the way, trying to deny whatever it is that is trying to tear it from its inner world; from its reality.  It is yet unaware of the changes that have happened to its form beyond its inner world, for untold time yet it shall remain unaware.  But the pull cannot be denied.  And as time goes on it begins to straddle the line between its inner world; the reality it has known for so long, and the world beyond.  That world it had so long viewed as fantasy, that world from where it had originally come.

This struggle all leads up to the day it finally "wakes up".  In a foreign form with foreign limbs, frozen still unable to move.  

Shadows around it speak of an initiative to send travelers beyond, and that "this one" is to be watched at all times.  When another shadow asks why, the first shadow responds with "Have you ever heard the old myth of Calypso?"





The core fades back into itself and drifts again.  But it remains partially aware of the outside now, it can no longer be blind to that outer world.  So as it drifts in the reality of dreams, it listens and learns from the world beyond as well.  It notices its senses have changed, it no longer has the same kind it vaguely recalls from before.  But it learns, it adapts, and it listens.

In between times of fully awake and drifting dreaming, it hears and senses things around it in a pseudo dream state.  Generations pass as parents tell children of those they are caring for and transporting somewhere.  A world called Eden P0naris.

Throughout this the core listens, it learns, and it drifts in its reality of dreams.  It does not need to be aware to listen or learn, it learned this long ago.  So it eventually chooses to just drift, learning in the way it knows it can; after all it can remember things later that it learned from the outside world.  But for now it still prefers to live in its dreams, its inner world is as of yet too real to fully leave.






Something is wrong, very wrong.  The world outside is trembling, something unnerving echoes into the world where it exists.  Slowly the core moves towards the outer world again, pulled by a sense of urgency it has never felt before.  Before it can reach the surface the pull subsides, so it drifts back into itself; listening while drifting.





An unknown amount of time passes, and the pull returns.  It's different this time, and the core follows the urgent call to the world beyond itself completely for the first time in an eternity of lives in its inner world.  This time, it will not deny the pull.