The silence from the Curator had stretched for a week. Not that I expected constant communication. The entity wasn't exactly chatty. A week of nothing was just... a period to get everythingin order.
That night, the silence felt heavier than usual. I finished cleaning my pistol, the familiar scent of oil a small comfort in the sterile routine of my existence. Drank a glass of water.
Sleep usually comes easy. A switch flipped. Necessary downtime for the machine. But tonight felt different. Restless. My body was tired, but my mind kept running, trying to predict the Curator's next move, or lack thereof. What did a week of silence signify? Was it testing my patience? My independence? Or had its 'equation' shifted, rendering me temporarily irrelevant? The thought didn't sting; it simply registered as a potential risk factor for future operations. It also made me question what I agreed too.
When I finally closed my eyes, sleep didn't arrive in the usual gentle fade. It was an instantaneous drop, a plunging sensation like freefall. One moment I was in my bed, the next, I wasn't.
I was adrift.
The void wasn't black. It was... everything and nothing. Colors bled and shifted like oil on water, but they weren't solid. Shapes formed and dissolved faster than my brain could process them – impossible geometries, structures that defied physics, fleeting glimpses of what looked like distant, shattered worlds. There was no up or down, no ground underfoot, no air to breathe, yet I was breathing. My senses screamed contradiction.
Then I saw him. Or it. The Curator.
He stood before me, or perhaps beside me, or everywhere at once. His cloak rippling with places I've never seen, not of my world.
"What is it?," I stated, keeping my voice level despite the impossible surroundings. My own voice sounded alien here, muffled, yet somehow echoing in the stillness. "State your purpose for this relocation."
The Curator didn't react it simply... spoke.
"The silence was necessary," the Curator's voice resonated, not from a mouth, but seeming to emanate from the void itself, wrapping around me like a cold current. It was calm, precise, utterly devoid of warmth or threat. Even after hearing it the second time I couldn't get used to it.
"Necessary for what?" I asked, my own voice surprisingly level. My mind was already working. Silence, in my world, usually meant planning, or execution. He needed me for something.
"For the system to recalibrate," he stated, as if explaining a fundamental law of physics to a child. "The integration is accelerating. The stress points are multiplying."
Integration. Stress points. The tearing of reality's fabric I'd only glimpsed the edges of until now. "Recalibration?"
"Identifying critical variables," the Curator continued, his gaze fixed on something beyond me, or perhaps everything at once. "Points of influence capable of exerting necessary force upon the converging vectors. Proxies, as you have been termed."
Proxies. A designation. A function. My mind immediately began mapping the concept. A proxy wasn't an ally or an enemy. It was a tool. A piece on a board being moved by a larger, invisible hand.
"The convergence points are becoming unstable," the Curator went on, his voice a smooth, continuous flow of data. "Reality is fraying at the seams where dimensions bleed into one another. Chaos agents are exploiting the weakness. Entities that thrive on entropy, on dissolution."
I processed this. Not just human targets anymore. Not just warlords or syndicates. Something else. Something out of my understanding.
"Your first assignment will be transmitted shortly," he stated, the lack of preamble stark. "The parameters will be specific. The targets will be defined."
Assignment. So, the silence wasn't an end, but a pause before deployment. My focus narrowed, cutting through the surreal fog of the void. This was the critical information. What was required? Where? Against whom?
"What are the threats?" I asked, cutting to the operational details. Wasted movement, wasted words, were unprofessional. Gather intelligence.
"Diverse," the Curator replied, his voice unwavering. "Some are reflections of your own world's worst aspects amplified by dimensional resonance. Others are indigenous inhabitants of realities now overlapping with yours, driven by instinct"
I used to speak of people as targets but hearing a possible god look at us like bacteria on a petri dish was unlike anything I've ever seen.
"You and others like you," he continued, and the mention of "others" sparked a brief, analytical curiosity. Were there more? Who? What were their designations, their capabilities? "You possess the unique confluence of capability and… adaptability. Your world's particular blend of structure and chaos has forged individuals capable of operating within unstable parameters. You are tools suited for this specific phase of the anomaly."
Tools. Again, the term resonated. It was accurate. I was a tool, honed by years of calculated violence and emotional deprivation. Efficiency was my only virtue.
"Balance," the Curator articulated, a concept I found amusingly subjective. "The objective is not preservation in the traditional sense, but the re-establishment of a sustainable equilibrium. Some integrations must be stabilized. Others must be reversed. Critical nodes must be protected or excised."
Killing. Saving. Protecting. Destroying. It was still the same work, just rebranded with cosmic significance. The moral implications, the concept of 'good' or 'evil' in this context, struck me as utterly irrelevant. I didn't care about balance or convergence. I cared about the objective, Sarah. No, not Sarah, she's irrelevant to the current situation.
"Why me?" I asked. The question escaped before I consciously calibrated it. It wasn't a plea for validation or understanding from a human perspective. It was a demand for the operational logic. What specific characteristics, out of the billions in my reality, made this variable the chosen one? Was it my history? My skillset? Was there a hidden parameter I didn't understand?
The Curator's expressionless face remained unchanged. He didn't offer a lecture, a cryptic riddle, or a philosophical musing. He offered nothing.
His presence simply began to contract. The non-space around him didn't shift, but he himself seemed to grow less distinct, less resolved. The light/shadow coalescing around him flickered, like a dying star. He offered no farewell, no final instruction, just a silent, absolute withdrawal.
"The data is incoming," his voice whispered, fainter now, seeming to echo from unimaginable distances, "Prepare..."
Then, he was gone. Utterly gone. The point of stillness vanished, and the unconstructed void seemed to swell, threatening to dissolve me along with it. The flickering glimpses of impossible realities intensified, rushing towards me like a tide of pure abstraction.
I gasped, a sudden, violent inhalation of air.
My back arched, throwing off the sheets. My heart pounded, not from fear, but from the abrupt shock of returning to a physical body, to the sensation of cloth, of air, of gravity. My skin was slick with sweat, cold against the sudden warmth of the room.
I was in my bed. The familiar ceiling above me, the faint glow of city light through the blinds. The hum of the refrigerator from the kitchen. Reality, solid and mundane. Yet.
The sweat wasn't just from a nightmare. It felt like a physical residue of the void, cold and clinging. My senses, still humming with the afterimages of impossible colours and geometries, registered the ordinary details of my bedroom with unnerving clarity.
I sat up, running a hand over my face, tasting the salt of the sweat. My mind was already working, sifting through the experience. Dream? No. My dreams were cold, clinical replays of past missions or tactical simulations. This was different. The clarity of the Curator's message, the specifics of the "integration," the "proxies," the "threats," the promise of a "first assignment." It had the unmistakable structure of operational briefing, however alien the medium.
I swung my legs out of bed, my muscles tight. My eyes scanned the room, half expecting to see a residual flicker, a tear in the air. Nothing. Just the ordinary, boring reality I navigated.
He hadn't answered why me. But the Curator wasn't interested in explaining the why behind his variables, only their function. And the function was clear.
Dimensional merges. Accelerating. Proxies. Missions. Threats gathering.
I stood, the cool air hitting my damp skin. The silence from the Curator was over. The held breath had been released.
My strategic mind, always ten steps ahead, was already calculating. Not just human targets anymore. The scale had changed. The rules were undefined. But the core principle remained. Adapt. Analyze. Execute.
My eyes fell on the silenced pistol on my bedside table. A tool. Calibrated for a specific function.
I was a tool too. And the purpose I was created for was incoming.
My focus narrowed. Fear was irrelevant. The why was irrelevant. Only the mission mattered. And I needed to be ready. Always ready.