“I need to update you on some stuff. The police came to my house today. Have you seen the police reports on the Hoffman Apartments yet?”

“What? When did this happen?” asked Caleb, “I will pull up the police reports on my end.”

“They came to my house a while before I came home and asked me what I knew. They were trying to determine if I was a clone. They hinted that I might be required to be tested at a later date. For now, I am safe though.”

“Holy shit,” said Caleb. He was scrolling through the files on the destruction of the apartments and had gotten to the point where it mentioned Jason’s name. “They found you in there. Dead as can be. So does this mean that the stranger tried killing you and what? Did the stranger succeed in killing the real you or in killing a clone?”

“I would say yes to both I guess. The stranger succeeded in killing me once before, but I know that I am not a clone but something else. Something that they didn’t expect. I don’t think it is a coincidence that a version of me died around the same time I appeared. They must know something about what is going on.”

“I would tend to agree. It matches up too well and is a good place to continue investigating. I will add this investigation that is ongoing under another group to my list of things to watch. Now that we know when and where you were last seen as you were once known I will work on tracing your steps back and see if I can find out why you might have been targeted.”

“I think I can help with that. I’ve tried going through the backlogs of video footage that I could, and I found one lead. Maybe you can see what else you can uncover from this conversation,” I said.

I brought up my camera files as I talked and brought up my recently watched videos. Once I found the one I was looking for I forwarded it to Caleb. The video showed me and John talking about my future. We discussed what I might do after my contract was up and whether or not I would continue to build under him or move on to work elsewhere. I waited for Caleb to finish watching the video before I continued.

“This one sticks out to me more than anything else. If someone was going to try and kill me or in this case has already done so once then it would be about this or about something I was working on that would affect the business of other manufacturers. Maybe I was in talks with other people to move businesses and someone didn’t want me going where I ultimately decided to go. I can’t be sure that John is the one who killed me, but he has had chances to do so over the past two weeks which makes it seem less likely. The problem is that I still don’t know who I could have talked to about this deal or what had interested them in killing me.”

“I wouldn’t count John out just yet. He may have realized that you lost your memory but found out that you were investigating where you shouldn’t have. I will send Rachel the video and have her take a look at it. She is one of your customers at the time that would have most likely heard about the end of your contract from you. If she knows anything else about the deal or what was happening around that time she will share.”

“Go ahead and send it to her,” I said agreeing with him. She could have the information I needed to solve this, and she was also part of this team I had been building around myself.

“Ok. Is there anything else from the videos that you could send me or anything else that I should know?”

“That already covered the main points. Hopefully, with this uncovering of my body, we can find who did this and why.”

“I hope so. Get some rest. When Thor comes over to visit at your warehouse I’ll have him bring any information up to date at that point that Rachel and I have gathered.”

“Thanks for doing this for me,” I said.

“Of course. Now go get some rest. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

Caleb ended the call, and I was left alone at home. I spent the rest of my afternoon resting on the couch until dinner. I turned on the TV and caught myself up on the news and current events. I had missed so much while I was both in the hospital and at work. One of the dynasty heroes Frost Cloak had undergone surgery and was set to have a new successor soon, politicians bickered with each other as usual when new policies were introduced. After going through the news, I switched over to a movie. I still felt culture shock as I tried to fit myself into this world. The popularity and ubiquity of heroes had made them equivalent to celebrities and social media icons from my old world, but they did not make up all of pop culture.

There were plenty of sports to watch made up of regular people or superhumans and new sports that could only occur between superhumans. I felt a bit saddened as I flicked through the channels for a while and looked at all of the unfamiliar information. So much had happened that I would hardly know. References to past events that were culturally significant. And then there were the future events from my old world I would never get to experience or get to participate in. Birthdays, deaths, or other gatherings I would never get to see now that I was here. My family and friends probably thought I was dead. I had never shown up for my math test and had seemingly disappeared in the library never to be seen again. They would never know what happened to me and I would never get to see what happened to them. Tears ran down my face as I scrolled without much thought and my eyes glazed over forgetting whatever happened on screen. I drowned it out in my head and laid my head on the pillows on the couch. I lay there for a while as I reminisced about my favorite things that could never be in this world. All of my favorite music was gone regardless of how old it was. There had been four hundred years since my timeline split from this one. It was plenty long for everything I could have cared about to be gone with little left. Of the few pieces of more recent media, I recognized it was Shakespeare. He had died before things had changed here so his works were still preserved. But other things would never be recovered from my memories because they were created more than halfway through this new timeline. My favorite movie series no longer existed. The conclusion to trilogies of movies gone and books I would never read or would never get to read again. Even recognizable buildings and famous locations were unrecognizable because the history of the Americas had changed drastically. I lay on the couch in silence for a while after turning the TV off and fell asleep while lying there.

I woke up early in the morning tired and hungry after not eating dinner the night before. I made myself a larger breakfast than usual and scarfed it down. I felt the aches in my side as I did so. I had checked my side earlier and the gunshot wound had faded and sealed up just below my ribs. Now there was little more than a mark going through my front and back where the bullet had gone through.

I got in the car and drove to the warehouse. I decided that today I would begin preparing some utility items and equipment while I waited for Thor to show up. I didn’t have any other orders to complete or projects to work on except the one set by John in five days. I wondered how he would react when he found out that I had put it off every step of the way. At this point, it was not someone that I could complete either on time or by myself right now. In the meantime, I would work on making equipment that could protect myself and others. From the fight, I knew that when the stranger attacked then they were likely to use similar weapons. If they had clear superhuman abilities that I could see then it would be a lot easier to defend against, but I would have been less likely to survive back then if that was the case. I wished that I knew what John’s power was so that I could more clearly cross him off the list or put him at the top.

I pulled up the list of equipment I had in stock on the computer and began looking through that list. On it was a variety of energy weapons and blades along with the handheld shield that Caleb had used. I brought up the list of items that I didn’t have the current stock for and compared. Some of the items that were out of stock were because I didn’t have the materials on hand while others were out of stock because they were less popular or were made of rarer materials.

I started making a list and got something to hold them all in. In the miscellaneous pile in my storage, I found a worn leather belt with many pouches and hooks to hold items. I tried it on and adjusted it to fit me. I slid two smoke bombs into holders along with a flash grenade onto the belt. I set it aside next to my computer and began going through the list of items I would add to the belt. I decided that I would make most of the stuff as modifications to my existing stock. This would save me time on building and would help me with assembly because I still had no idea how to do some of the stuff surrounding electronics yet as seen by the plasma gun I had yet to finish for John.

I got started on the modifications to the first item on my list, a gun. The modifications I needed to improve the power of each shot and the number of shots I could dish out before needing new batteries or recharge. I also decided on a special muzzle that would cause the energy to give off more of a shocking effect rather than a burning heat. The attachment of the pieces was easy to take care of and only required a few screws and glue, but the electronics were harder. I needed to resolder a few components and put new ones in their place if I wanted to add the new power settings that I required. The battery was also easy to slot in once I had moved some pieces around. The final steps for the added shots weren’t really steps at all because the power cells with larger charges were held in a different magazine that I found in my storage area. Once the gun was reassembled I put it and some extra magazines in the belt.

Next, I was on to upgrading the handheld shield. It was the same version that Caleb had held but it would now be stronger and easier to handle. I had seen some of its flaws during the fight with the stranger and I intended to be prepared for when it was needed again. I switched out its battery pack for a more volatile but higher energy density one and switched out a piece of the controller that dealt with the power regulation. The change only took about thirty minutes and then I was able to test it afterward. Because of the change in the battery, the device was heavier than before but looked otherwise no different. I held it up in my palm and the circular device activated when I pushed on the button with my thumb. Its energy shield shot outward and expanded to double the size of the original shield. It hummed and was warm to the touch as I held it in front of me. The shield was brighter than the previous one and its color was darker and less translucent. I smiled as I held it up and moved it around a few times. In the end, I shut it off and pocketed it in one of the belt’s front pouches.

I was in the middle of working on the next pieces when I got a knock at my door from Thor. I opened the door and let him in as Barry Norman in his regular clothes. The man was in his thirties and towered over me. With his towering height came the large muscles of a bodybuilder and long red hair and beard. He held a large smile that felt comforting. He passed me a set of papers in a file as we walked back over to my desk.

“These are Caleb’s recent findings. He also wanted me to pass on the info from Rachel. He said that you should read over it first before his findings and that they will be on top.”

“Ok. Thanks for bringing this over. I will take a look at it,” I said as I peeked a look at it. He put his hand down on the folder and I looked back up into his eyes. He set the files down on the desk.

“You can worry about that after going over what I need from you.”

“Of course. Sorry about that” I said, “You were wanting something made as well as checking up on me right?”

“I need some electricity attractors. Lightning, especially when drawn out of my body can be unpredictable so I usually carry attractors with me to throw onto enemies. It also helps limit collateral damage. It should be in your file database.”

“Of course, I can make that for you. When do you need them by, and do you need anything else?” I asked.

“No. I need to get going. I have some thugs to beat up because of a drug bust operation. You should be able to make the items in about an hour or two. I will be needed a minimum of five but will take more if you can do so when I pick them up on Monday.”

“I’ll see you on Monday then. Thanks for stopping by and also thank you for saving my life on Thursday. I don’t think I would have survived otherwise.”

“It is my job, and you were nearby. I can’t be letting people die around me. Especially on Thor’s day of all day. I wish you luck on your mission to find this person. When you find them they will come to face the justice one deserves for attacking a friend of the Dynasty.”

Barry left the warehouse, and I was left with the files and a new assignment. I pulled up the equipment he requested after a quick search. Each of the attractors was a small mostly metal disk with a sticky side that could be attached to almost any material and stay there. The disks could then be activated by a control device and create a strong magnetic and electric field that would draw the stray electricity Thor shot and channel it into the person or thing it had attached to. I checked the instructions briefly and found that the assembly process was pretty straightforward but would require some precision to set the smaller pieces in with tweezers.

I moved on to the files that Barry had brought. Rachel had written up a short entry on what she knew about my contract. It read: ‘I knew that you were in talks about renegotiating for a better contract soon once your current one ended with your boss. I don’t know much of the specifics of how it went. You seemed unsure of which path you would take in the end. I also know that you were working on some personal projects around that time that kept you busy, and some were meant bargaining chips for better deals. From Caleb’s digging, he couldn’t find any official contract papers submitted in your name, so it seems as though you never finalized a deal.’

Caleb’s comments were more extensive and had the printed results of several programs attached. I skimmed through the results and tried to summarize them and fit them into the timeline of events and actions we had been slowly assembling. ‘I ran a word analyzer to find the most frequently occurring words after filtering out basic words such as ‘the’, ‘and’, and so on. The two most common things to come up were a CNC and 3D printing process for over 80 percent of the files which is generally considered very advanced, and the other thing came up at almost 80 percent as well as a monitoring device called ARGO which only came up in the personal notes sections of the instructions. I believe this is why the files were deleted. I referenced some of the other files on your computer and found that no other files referenced it. That made me wonder what it was because it isn’t a standard tool I could find through device manufacturers. The results came to me after I looked through the deep scan of your computer again. I was able to pull from the deleted space on your storage and recover the normally inaccessible data. The tool’s full name is Advanced Robotic General Observation tool and is a pseudo-AI assistant. These are the specs I could find that were deleted three weeks ago.’