Silence in Time is a science-fiction thriller story series revolving around a master assassin. This post is a compilation of all 9 chapters in Series 1 of Silence in Time. All writing and illustrations are original and exclusive to Steemit.
New to this compilation are wonderful manga-style illustrations drawn by @pixielolz. All chapters have also been re-edited, including some minor retcons.
Do check out @pixielolz's account on making of the illustrations.
Series 2 is coming in September, continuing the story while adding superhero / vigilante elements. This post will act as a catch-up before Series 2.
Chapter 1
W, a woman in her mid-thirties, is a master assassin. She is in her bunker - a quaint, remote dig in - out in the countryside. Despite the quiet, the bunker is a deadly place. There's a cornucopia of weaponry, all packed within a tight space. Not a single piece of equipment is destructive or explosive, however. It's just an array of silent and stealth weapons - silenced sniper rifles, hallucinogens, silenced pistols, plasma and smoke grenades, and so on. In the corner, there's a wardrobe of disguise - dresses, masks, hair and make-up.
W is dressing up in casuals, aiming to look like the Average Jane. It's the kind of get up that will allow her to blend in very well - be completely inconspicuous.
She is assembling a silenced pistol. It's an improvised device cobbled together from different parts - she has built it herself. It's not something mass produced at a factory. She leaves the bunker, out into the open. It really is a rural area, with no signs of civilisation in sight. She test fires the pistol - it's deadly and precise, and completely silent.
Hours later, W checks into a hotel, wearing the same dress. It's very late at night - the hotel is practically empty. Despite this, no one notices or stops her, in part due to her confident demeanour. She rides the elevator up to the fifth floor.
On the fifth floor, she waits till she spots the hotel housekeeper walking down the corridor. She engineers an altercation, dropping her purse right in front of the housekeeper, and bumping into him. During this brief moment, she deftly steals the steward's access card. She apologizes and walks away - the housekeeper is none the wiser.
This grants her access to all rooms on the floor. W heads towards room 515 and uses the housekeeper's key card to enter the room, in absolute silence.
A man is sleeping - he is the target. W breaks out an infrared camera to verify. She takes out her silenced pistol, aims at the man. She holds for a moment, contemplating her action. She is about to pull the trigger...
...but suddenly collapses to the ground. It's as if she fainted out of the blue.
Chapter 2
W is still on the floor, passed out. Even her fall was absolutely silent, and the target is still fast asleep.
About thirty seconds later, W wakes up. She is shocked to find a silenced pistol in her hand and has no idea where she is or how she got there!
W has had a complete memory blackout. It's a pure case of retrograde amnesia - she has no memories whatsoever from before the collapse. As is the case with retrograde amnesia, she can recall how to do things - her skills, but nothing about her person or world. So, with her sharp instincts intact, she does not panic. Calmly, she picks up the pistol and walks out of the room. She takes the elevator down and strolls out of the hotel and to a quiet, solitary alleyway.
Methodically, W surveys all material she has on hand. It's just a pistol, a dress, and eight dollars in cash. Like her own private investigator, she sets out on a journey to discover who she was.
She lays down the facts - to her it seems pretty clear that she was out to murder someone, but passed out of, perhaps, fear. It was this shock that caused her to lose all her long term memory up to the point.
But she looks at the pistol - it is a work of art custom designed to fit her hand. Her instincts tell her that she designed it - so she couldn't have been a stranger fearful of weapons and murder. Surely, the amnesia was not due to a shock.
Back on track, she contemplates the next step. She can't go to the police - it's obvious she was committing a first degree crime. So she starts by visiting an internet café. She takes a picture with the webcam and reverse searches the internet. No results at all. She checks up her fingerprint against the public database. Nope. Nothing.
Next, she tracks down the dress maker. It's a wildly mass produced product at a departmental store and they have no logs of customers. They can't tell W when her dress was bought or by whom.
Throughout her day, she discovers several things about herself - an extreme proficiency at pickpocketing, manipulating people, computer hacking, to name a few.
It's all starting to make sense. It may be disturbing for someone with a fresh mind, but she knows - she can feel it - she was a spy, a saboteur or an assassin.
Chapter 3
There was only one last item pending investigation - the improvised silenced pistol.
Alas, unlike the dress, she couldn't just walk into a weapon shop and inquire about the make. So she resorted to the dark net. After a week, she finally had a contact - a master arms dealer and designer who agreed to look at her pistol. Only problem - he was bloody expensive.
In this week, she had become aware of her formidable skills. A real ninja. She could infiltrate places effortlessly, hack computers, manipulate people. Thus far, she has used her skills to gather information about herself. But now, the time has come for big money.
Reluctantly, she took up a job for a criminal gang on the dark net. Her job description - assist with a heist. The job was simple - infiltrate through the back door of a bank, and shut down the alarm system. It all went according to plan. However, she felt guilty. She wondered if she could really have be an assassin - her conscience felt strong.
With the funds gathered, she met the underground weapon master. He checked out the pistol but was completely flummoxed. He had never seen anything like it. He said there are a thousand different parts, but he has no idea how it came together. W knew this - but had hoped the master gunsmith would have a brainwave.
There we are. Back to square one. It has been three weeks since W lost her memory. Yet, she is just as far away from uncovering her identity. Dress, gun, no traces whatsoever.
W was a good investigator, but before her amnesia, she was an even more masterly stealth artist. It's almost as if she did not exist. A ghost, a shadow, a master assassin.
Chapter 4
Three weeks on, W has rediscovered her formidable skills - a master at stealth, infiltration, weapon design, manipulating people, hacking, and a whole lot more. A true maestro.
However, she has no clue whatsoever about who she was before the incident. It's clear to her that she was at the hotel room for an assassination, but nothing on her person left any trails.
Except herself - her body. With every other lead at a dead end, there's just one asset that retains her identity - her DNA. DNA sequencers are expensive, slow, and only available to verified personnel. So, W sets in motion a plan to infiltrate a prototype DNA sequencing lab and stealthily get her DNA sequenced.
Three days later, W is under the building housing the research lab. She is working on a broken down power distribution board. She attaches a switching module to the main switch, and carefully exits the area. W lurks near the parking, waiting, in a dark spot.
Moments later, a man passes by, she quietly sneaks up to him, and captures him, covering his face with a chloroform rag. This puts him to sleep. She drags him to the same dark corner, and removes his employee RFID tag.
She makes her way up the building - this is an old, retro building from the 60s. However, it is maintained well. It is once again late at night - very quiet. She waits outside the lab, until an employee exits through a sliding door.
Just as the employee has left the area, she presses a trigger. This disrupts power, and blacks out the entire building except for some emergency lights. The sliding door into the lab also freezes, half open. There’s some chaos inside the lab in response to the unusual power cut, and she fully exploits this distraction to her advantage.
This also triggers her watch timer, it reads 00:30. 00:29. 00:28.
Chapter 5
W enters the lab through the half open door, and quickly hides away in a dark corner for a couple of seconds, mapping out the area. 00:24 on the watch.
She then swiftly and adeptly makes her way through the dark areas, dodges the patches of emergency light to avoid detection by CCTVs.
This requires her to slide across the floor, prone and crawl, through the short corridor.
She sees an employee running down the corridor. 00:11 left on the watch. She hides and holds her breath, tensely.
00:10. 00:09. 00:08. 00:07. The employee is out of sight.
Running out of time, she rushes and slides down the corridor.
Finally, with seconds left, she enters a room titled “Rapid DNA Sequencer - Prototype 3b”.
The timer ticks to 00:00 and the lights come back on. All of this - from the time of blackout - happens within only 30 seconds. Yet, W does not skip a beat.
Inside, she has hidden herself under and behind the CCTV camera. She attaches a proxy camera to the room’s CCTV to freeze the image.
There is nothing in the room but a machine - a desktop computer, attached to an apparatus with a syringe.
She boots the machine - the display is a rudimentary command line interface. After typing in a couple of lines, she places her finger on the syringe, which draws in blood. The display switches to "Sequencing in Progress".
Chapter 6
W boots the rapid DNA Sequencer machine - the display is a rudimentary command line interface. After typing in a couple of lines, she places her finger on the syringe, which draws in blood. The display switches to "Sequencing in Progress".
The chaos outside has subsided, but W keeps a close eye out, as the progress bar ticks down.
Minutes later, it’s done. She uploads the data to a flash drive and draws a breath at the door. She exits the room, and casually walks along the corridor, onto the rear exit. She exits using the stolen keycard. (Chapter 4)
By now, the security has discovered the intrusion, and raised the alarms. She drops her casual pace, and makes a run for it, leaping through emergency stairs. The stealth factor of the operation is now blown - but it's all going according to plan for W.
She runs through the stairs, to the parking area. The pursuers can be heard, but they are way behind and cannot be seen.
She enters a cheap hatchback car that is strategically parked next to the exit. She starts the car, sets off, and leaves the area.
Back at her base, she starts looking at her DNA. It's extremely unusual - the analyzer CLI returns the result -
"Species Unknown"
The DNA is a 99.99% match for Homo Sapiens Haplogroup H20, but it's not enough. There must be some error - she's clearly a homo sapien. Or is she? Perhaps she's a mutant - that would explain her superhuman skills.
Looking further, there's something further amiss. Next to every 1 in 1 million CAGT pair there is are two unknown nucleobases the analyzer placeholders as - U and A.
W isolates these together. It's a series of Us and As. But what if you replace Us and As with 1s and 0s?
It's code. It's binary code!
Chapter 7
W isolates the stray Us and As, and replaces them with 1s and 0s. She arranges and compiles the 1s and 0s together to what is clearly binary code.
However, converting to text, there doesn't seem to be any logic to it - it's just gibberish. Neither is it a picture. So it must be sound. And so it is - sound hidden within W's DNA!
At first, the sound is inaudible, but some frequency tweaking reveals a voice. A crackly old man with a think British accent, speaking casually - as if he's cruising the Bahamas.
Hey there. I am Bong. But err... this ain’t about me. You, you are a human being, but one not birthed of a mother; instead created by... whatcha may call, artificial super-intelligence or uhh, super smart machines. But enough about us... though I will say, we are from a different space and time, and you’re the only one of your kind. Yeah, you are pretty much alone.
W looks on in gentle disbelief.
So, where was I? Ah yeah, you. You are by all means human. Physiologically indistinguishable from any modern human, yet psychologically evolutionarily advanced. Gosh, those are some big words. Anyway, you were...in quotes - sent... with an imprinted memory, to undertake a set of... missions. But I guess since you are listening to this, you’ve probably f*cked up. So, ah, mission's aborted. Yeah, I know you wanna know more, but I think that’s all I gotta say.
Do watchha wanna, but maybe try to make your world a cooler place. Over and out.
Chapter 8
It has been three weeks since W first listened to the Bong's revelation. Finally, it all makes some sense. W is an engineered human being, from a different space-time continuum. She was sent to our world and our time to be a saboteur, an assassin, and a spy. Alas, she "malfunctioned", though in reality, the retrograde amnesia process is identical to that in natural humans. The voice within her DNA was indeed a failsafe, a message to be discovered in case of such a malfunction. W's origins were no longer a mystery, but all this did was raise even more questions.
The first of which, of course, is - who is Bong? Does he have any connection to our here and now? It took three weeks, but W has finally found Bong.
Bong is a young college drop-out from Buncheon, South Korea. W has infiltrated his residence - a tiny, messy apartment - and draws a gun while Bong sits down to play on his game console. Instinctively, Bong raises his hands.
"Raising your hands won't help", says W, in a calm voice. Bong, baffled, "Uhh... I have never had a gun pointed at me before. I'm just a broke ass student, what do you want from me?"
"Relax. I just want you to listen to something", W replies, still pointing the gun at Bong. W plays back the sound clip on her phone. (Chapter 7)
Bong is bemused listening to this, while W's gun continues to be aimed at him. W doesn't say a word. Bong is silent too. He gestures at W, but there's complete quiet.
Breaking the silence, Bong starts laughing hysterically. "Nice prank! I don't know who you are or what you want Miss, but...."
W interrupts, "You know what this is about. I don't need to tell you."
Bong's mood changes rapidly. Thoughtfully, he contemplates, "Maybe you are stark raving mad, Miss. But let me guess what you're thinking. That I'm the same Bong. I made you in the future and sent you back in time. You're pissed off. You want to kill me so you were never put through this misery."
Chapter 9
W stays quiet, still aiming the pistol at Bong. He looks straight into W's eyes.
He breaks the silence, "Come on, you can't believe that! That can’t be me from the future, you can’t possibly travel back in time, but... alternate di--". He stops speaking abruptly.
W prods him along, Bong continues "Hmm... Never mind."
"But you aren't going to gain anything by... offing me."
"You are a smart man, Bong. Think about it.", W finally breaks her silence.
Bong contemplates, "Ahh... Interdimensional revenge, huh? Well, I give up, Miss. Do what you have to...". He shuts his eyes.
W engages the safety catch on the pistol and puts it back on the table. She says, sternly, "I'm not here for revenge or blood..."
Bong is breathless, interrupts her, "...Oh yeah? What are you here for... who are you, anyway?"
His eyes light up, "Wait a second, is this something to do with the making it a cooler place business?" [Chapter 7]
W smiles - it may be her very first smile in this saga. "You are a smart man, Bong. I need your help."
Bong: "Do I have a choice?"
W: "You always have a choice."
The End of Series 1.
Series 2 is coming soon. I'd love some feedback on the format. Do you prefer Chapter-wise posts on a regular basis? Or a compilation with one mega-post like we have here? Would love to hear more thoughts about the best presentation form for stories on Steemit.