PROLOGUE

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It was cold.

Angry fingers of wind poked and pulled at his thin t-shirt, making another shiver irresistible. Eric adjusted position on his perch and looked down with weary eyes.

Far below, lurid patterns formed and disappeared in the briefest of moments as strobing blues and reds collided with the grey oxide metalwork of the bridge. Everything else had stopped, and only the headlights of stationary vehicles stretching into the distance like daisy-chains hinted at the disruption he was causing.

He shivered again.

“At least let me get you a blanket, Eric?” a grey-haired man in a brown suit called over, buttoning his jacket and turning up the collar. “It’s getting chilly up here now. Just while you think. That can’t hurt, can it?”

Eric had to admit the offer was tempting. The guy, Dean, said he was a negotiator, said he was there to help. But the young wetware specialist couldn’t even remember how he’d gotten to this place, let alone what needed negotiating.

For the last hour he’d rambled, more to himself than Dean, and the older man had listened with quiet sympathy to the confused mixture of statements and questions. Every so often affirming Eric’s safety. Gently repeating that friends were worried and wanted him to come home. Softly asserting, while the young man looked towards the city in bewilderment, that no good answers would be found at the top of a bridge in the middle of the night.

“Eric,” the negotiator called again. “The blanket?”

On a conscious level the twenty-six-year-old understood the sensible option was to go with Dean. But something was stopping him; something was off. A certainty he couldn’t quite grasp gnawed at the edges of his mind, and the wetware creator felt trapped.

That had to be an odd feeling when people were only trying to help — didn’t it?

He stared over at the greying guy in the brown suit again, a growing sense of unease about the man belying what his senses were telling him. 

“This isn’t real,” he heard himself murmur, turning away and beginning to rock. “This isn’t real.”

 “Eric,” Dean shouted over, noticing the change and trying to re-focus the younger man. “That isn’t the answer. It’s never an answer. Stay with me and let’s figure this out. There has to be something I can do?”

Stopping his swaying, the exhausted engineer looked back again. “You could let me go.”

A sincere smile spread across the negotiator’s rugged face and he held out a reassuring hand. “Hey, you’re not under arrest. You’ve done nothing wrong. Of course you can go. Let’s just get you down. Warm. Safe. Figure the rest out from there?”

But the older man’s smile didn’t extend to his eyes and Eric’s cold lips slowly stretched into a manic grin of their own; fragments of memory beginning to surface like flotsam.

“Did you think I wouldn’t remember we’ve been here before, Dean?” he spat back through the wind, only processing what he was saying as the words fell out of him.

The grey-haired man gave a visible sigh and shook his head. “Then why do it again? Let me help you.” He looked down at the tarmac one hundred and fifty feet below. “We both know you won’t find what you’re looking for like this.”

Now focused solely on the negotiator, a parade of fear and resolve battled across Eric’s features in involuntary response to a body preparing to defy all of its natural programming. Adrenalin exploded through his system and energy surged into the cold, aching muscles of both arms, which then bunched for one final act.

He pushed forward on that moment’s instinct, and as gravity took his body beyond the possibility of any change of mind, a resolute Eric, who in those last seconds seemed to remember himself, called back, “Neither will you.”

Face now expressionless, Dean watched the wetware designer fall. He’d been so close this time. With an irritated sigh, the man in the brown suit looked up at the starless sky above him and said, “Reset.”