What Happened Down In Samothrace » A Certain Type of Mind
It had been two weeks since Jay had last made contact with his team, and the experience was worsened hundredfold by the fact that he could no longer remember their names. Each time he tried to access that section of his brain, something inside him shut off, and his mind's eye began to glaze over. He'd almost given himself a haemorrhage trying to picture their faces, and right now he was beginning to lose hope of ever being rescued — the landscape, with its half-buried ruins and flickering sky, looked the same wherever he went.
For the last three days, he'd been moving slowly towards the only landmark he could see: a skyscraper, although it was barely deserving of that title, with only twelve stories jutting above the earth and a quantity of rubble around it that gave it more the appearance of an ancient pyramid than a modern office block. He had undertaken this journey under the assumption that his team (whoever they were) would also be able to see it, and would meet there under standard Missing Person Protocols. The fact that they might not even remember Jay existed had crossed his mind many times, but as with a lot of his current thoughts, he was trying desperately not to focus on it.
With a shudder, he squeezed a syringe full of a foul-smelling blue liquid into his forearm, and dry-swallowed a trio of pills. "One for hindsight, one for foresight, and one for dreams", his training recited back to him. Foot after foot, with a backpack full of mnestics and nonexistent maps, he made his way towards his goal.
It was not long before the lone Foundation Agent entered the remains of what he could only assume was a city. "Was" being the operative word — if there was anything alive in this abandoned husk of a town, it was not something Jay wanted to meet. Possessions lay in charred piles in the streets, houses had been flattened and rotted to almost nothing, and a low hum pervaded the area like an unwanted guest. He tried whistling some simple tunes to clear his head and steady his nerves, but the "city" had an unusual echo for somewhere so flat and empty, and he was soon shouted back into silence by a myriad of out-of-sync voices.
At the corner of one street, after wading through a waist-high mixture of mud and ash, Jay could just make out a signpost, leaning suggestively against one of the few standing walls. He stared at it for several minutes, horrified. Where there should have been names, only the silvered sheen of scratched metal stared back at him, dull and menacing. "This is not a place for you", it seemed to say. "We're here now." Jay thought this was stupid, and said so. He half expected the sign to speak back, but of course it didn't. It just sat there, and, with the grace of a practiced drunkard, keeled over into the mud. As Jay scrambled away from the splash, he could have sworn he heard it chuckling.