The Voice in My Head Claims to Be My Descendant
“Uuugh…….”
My eyes fluttered open to an unfamiliar ceiling, my skull splitting with pain.
How long had I been unconscious? Only after squinting against the harsh glare of the LED lights and gathering my wits did I finally figure out where I was.
A hospital……?
I was plastered with machines of every kind, a thick tube shoved down my throat. The pressure binding me made it impossible to even sit up, and all I could manage was a grotesque groan.
“Huh? Uh……? Patient! You're awake?”
At the first sign of movement, a nurse rushed over in wide-eyed alarm to check on me. Then, reading my desperately trembling eyes as a plea to get these barbaric contraptions off me, she went sprinting off somewhere, shouting.
“Head nurse! The brain-dead patient in here woke up! Head nurse!”
Brain-dead……?
Before I could even process the outrage of being classified as a vegetable when my consciousness had returned this vividly, people came flooding in. The moment they pulled the tube from deep in my throat, I finally managed a proper breath between violent coughs.
“Khh…….”
The pain brought tears to my eyes unbidden. As I writhed against that terrible sensation I never wanted to feel again, the doctor who came to see me reacted even more strongly than the nurse had.
“This is impossible. How are you awake?”
“I'm sorry…… what?”
The doctor stared at me in disbelief, asking how I'd possibly woken up. Then he gave me a fairly detailed account of how I'd ended up in this hospital.
“So…… you're saying I was brought here two days ago, and my condition was so critical you had to operate immediately?”
“That's right. I don't know what happened, but the back of your head was severely damaged. The blood loss was serious, and you were on the verge of cardiac arrest when you arrived, so we couldn't afford to waste a single second.”
My condition had been too dire to wait for consent from me or any guardian. And the prognosis of that emergency surgery had not been good.
“We managed to stop the bleeding and stabilize your vitals, but…… the brain damage was so severe that you eventually slipped into brain death. We confirmed that even your brainstem had ceased functioning. So how on earth…….”
Not a mere coma, but complete brain death — the total inability to sustain any voluntary life functions.
That was why I'd been hooked up to this monstrous array of equipment, kept alive by machines alone, and the doctor's shock at my awakening was considerable.
“Well, the fact that you're talking to me right now proves you're not brain-dead.”
“A brain-death diagnosis can't be a misdiagnosis, though……. Let's run some additional tests. A brain spontaneously recovering function like this — I can say with certainty that it never happens.”
Wearing an expression that mixed shock, confusion, and perhaps the hope of having stumbled upon an extraordinarily rare medical discovery, the doctor ordered more tests. Only after they'd stripped every piece of equipment from my body and run a whole battery of additional examinations was I finally moved from the ICU to a regular room.
“Oh my goodness! Our Gun! Are you all right?”
“I'm fine, Grandma.”
“The doctor said you might never wake up again…….”
“Well, I'm talking with you right now, aren't I? I'm really fine.”
“Thank heavens. Truly…….”
“I'm honestly fine, so you can go home. It's the busiest season for the fields, isn't it?”
“Nonsense. How could I leave you here in a hospital? I'd worry myself sick.”
“There's nothing for you to do just sitting here, Grandma. Really.”
I wasn't so incapacitated that I needed a live-in caregiver like other patients — the only thing wrapped around me was a thick bandage around my head. So I reassured my grandmother and grandfather, my only family, who had abandoned the farm and come all the way to Seoul, and sent them back home. But even after that, a few uninvited guests kept showing up.
“You're Kang Gun, correct? I'm the detective in charge of your case. The thing is, we suspect it's connected to the string of hit-and-run assaults that have been occurring frequently in the area where your accident happened. According to the CCTV footage from that night…….”
“Hey. You doing okay? Not dead yet?”
Only after enduring what was essentially a harsh interrogation disguised as a detective's questions about my accident, and receiving visits from what few friends I had, one by one, was I finally able to enjoy my first real moment of peace since regaining consciousness.
“Whew……. You really do see everything in this world.”
I was only twenty-nine, and I'd already experienced what it felt like to die. Lying in bed and staring at the ceiling as I replayed the events of that night, I was caught completely off guard by a voice that came out of nowhere.
System stabilization complete.
Bio-synchronization rate……. 50%.
“Huh……?”
Startled by a voice resembling the mysterious announcement I'd heard just before losing consciousness, I sat up in bed and looked around — but the other patients went about their business without so much as a flicker of reaction. I knew instinctively: this sound was audible to me alone.
Minimum synchronization threshold for system activation met.
Executing Program: ARK.
“What the…….”
The moment I muttered in confusion, a pounding headache surged through my skull. And before long, a flippant, boyish male voice — no, a boy's voice — began echoing inside my head.
[What the heck is this?]
The boy sounded as if he were saying exactly what I'd been about to say. Then, in a voice full of disbelief, he started shrieking and rattling my skull.
[Oh, for f—'s sake! Why is it 2020 instead of 2200? Which idiot screwed up the settings?]
[Wow! We are so screwed. Of all things, on a mission this monumental — saving humanity — someone pulls a blunder this absurd? Whose skull am I even stuck in right now?]
“Excuse me, what are you…….”
[I don't know who you are, mister, but shut up and stay still for a minute. I need to pull the logs before I can figure out what's going on.]
I had no idea what he was doing, but a wave of dizziness washed over me along with a spinning sensation in my head. Yet once that feeling subsided, the boy's voice returned, sounding as though he'd pieced everything together.
[Mm-hm. So that's how this crapstorm happened. Absolutely godawful. F—.]
As if conversation were impossible without a curse attached to every sentence, the boy in my head swore with every breath. But he quickly recovered his composure and muttered to himself.
[Well……. Either way, the bio-chip implanted successfully, and the genetic code partially matches. So the project wasn't a total failure. Small mercies.]
[And the era……. We overshot way further into the past than planned, but maybe that's actually a good thing?]
The boy rambled on about things I couldn't make heads or tails of. Then, apparently having organized his thoughts, he turned his attention back to me.
[Right then. Let me formally introduce myself. I am a bio-implantable Control Persona created in Union Year 31 — 2635, by your calendar. The name's Alex.]
[And……. Strictly speaking, you could call me your descendant.]
“What……?”
Utterly preposterous nonsense was ringing in my skull. Just then, the doctor came in to check on me, tilted his head at my dazed expression, and asked.
“Patient? Is something the matter? What's wrong?”
“Um…….”
This unknown voice in my head. But since everything it said sounded completely insane to anyone listening, I turned to the doctor with the most serious, grave expression I'd ever worn and asked:
“Is it possible for a head injury to cause, you know…… psychosis?”
My question earned me another dozen or so additional tests. Only after receiving results that pronounced me perfectly normal, and after listening at length to the explanations of the so-called Control Persona chattering away inside my head, was I finally able to accept my current reality.
“So…… you're telling me you're a Control Persona made by copying the personality of my descendant from the future?”
[That's what I said. If you'd been a complete stranger with entirely different genetic traits, the implant would have failed outright. Of course, your lineage turned out to be waaay further up the tree than expected, which is why my sync rate is only around fifty percent — but given the circumstances, I'd call that a stroke of fortune.]
A Control Persona copied from a descendant who would be born not a few generations, but dozens of generations down the line. And the reason he had been sent from the far future into the past was to prevent the countless tragedies about to unfold.
“You're saying the Earth is going to blow up a few hundred years from now?”
[Yep. And I'm not joking — it literally goes BOOM. It's not some giant planet hurtling from the far edge of the universe to ambush and smash into Earth. Some morons, scared of losing a war and too cowardly to die alone, detonate thousands of Heavy-Quantum Fission Bombs all at once near the planet's core and blow the entire Earth to smithereens.]
A future war so insane it would make nuclear holocaust look tame. As he described how the Earth itself had been destroyed by the madness of a demented hegemonic power facing certain defeat, his voice took on a bitter edge.
[That event blasted away more than half of Earth's planetary core, and the planet's collapse began. With annihilation imminent, humanity gathered and racked its brains for a solution — but repairing a planet with a destroyed core was impossible, both technologically and in terms of time.]
“So the conclusion you came up with was…… go back in time and stop the tragedies before they happen. Something like that?”
[Exactly.]
A clichéd setup straight out of some story I'd seen somewhere. But this was no mere fantasy or thought experiment — the humanity of the future had actually carried it out. Still, things didn't seem to be going according to their plan.
[The man who created me — or rather, the chief director who planned and executed every aspect of the Ark Project, the initiative that distilled all of humanity's science and technology — was Rupert Greene. And he's your descendant. I am the Control Persona created by copying the personality of Rupert Greene's one and only son.]
Along with his explanation, an image of Rupert Greene was being jammed straight into my brain. Staring at the photo of a middle-aged man that only I could see, I asked, dumbfounded.
“That man is…… white?”
[I guess you or one of your descendants married a white person somewhere down the line. Does it matter?]
“You didn't exactly pick the right person, did you?”
[……. The bio-chip operates on genetic code, so if the genetic traits were completely different, the implant itself would have been impossible in the first place. Either way, the point is you're the one who passed down your genes.]
“……?”
Imagine it.
One day, without so much as a by-your-leave, you get slammed into someone else's skull and nearly ferried across the River of the Dead — and now you're stuck in this insane situation where the son of a blue-eyed, blond-haired, middle-aged white man is claiming to be your descendant?
But before I could even press the matter, Alex muttered bluntly.
[Anyway, that's not the important part, so moving on. I'm quite bewildered myself. We're nearly two centuries ahead of the target era, you know? The Ark doesn't contain detailed information about this period, so there's not much I can properly help you with.]
Alex seemed to have brought along a mountain of every piece of information needed to change the future, all calibrated for the year 2200. But because we'd landed in an era far earlier than that, he grumbled that there was nothing much worth using — then smacked his lips and said:
[Well, there's no helping it given the situation. Fortunately, humanity has entered the Information Age — primitive, sure, but a global network is already in place. So the domains I can meddle in aren't completely nonexistent.]
[Hey, Grandpa. Care to join me in a little something on the grand scale?]
“……. Who exactly are you calling Grandpa?”
[Oh, come on. Maybe not today, but eventually you'll be a grandfather regardless. Not right now, sure — but the world's doomed in a few hundred years anyway, so how about lending a hand for the sake of future humanity?]
Vmmm.
A single figure projected itself onto my eyes alone.
Blond-haired, brimming with mischief, a white boy who looked about thirteen or fourteen — an utterly youthful appearance. He called me Grandpa, yet looked so alien to me. With a deep smile and a voice more serious than I'd heard from him yet, he spoke to me.
Conquer the Earth, that is.