Cross My Mind

MILA'S MEMORIES

*****(Abuja Nigeria)*****

Garba’s taxi arrived at the nearest car dealership after an hour of driving through Abuja’s traffic. Garba paid the taxi driver and walked toward the dealership center where over twenty cars of different brands and classes have been arranged at the entrance to capture the attention of any passerby who has even the slightest interest in cars. Garba passed the entrance and straight inside.

“welcome to bright future car dealership, would you like to look at our catalog to help you find the kind of car you are looking for” A beautiful woman dressed in blue and black said. Looking at her, Garba accesses the phone in her pocket by connecting accepting the holographic connect request that popped on him as soon as he was close enough to her.

Every time Garba connects to a new computer or mobile phone, the speed taken to establish the connection increases. For the receptionist in the car dealership, it took mere seconds for Garba to access her phone and start to go through her details and files as she welcomes him and started to ask him what kind of her he wants to buy. Her name is Deborah based on her profile, she is twenty nine and although many people think she is the receptionist at the dealership, it took Garba a few seconds to find out that she owns half the dealership.

“Actually Deborah, you can just take me to your latest edition electric vehicles that can charge using solar panels within their bodies. I a also in a hurry so let us not waste much time”. Garba said, mistakenly letting her name slip out of his tongue. He quickly realized that he has earned her undivided attention and curiosity by doing so and that may result in a waste of more of his time if he doesn’t cover for how he knows her name quickly.

The woman looks very shocked by the fact that a man she has never seen in her life, who has a very odd facial appearance with a blue and brown eyes just called her by name even though she was not wearing a tag and has no recollection of ever telling him what her name is.

“h……how did you know my name, by any chance, have we met before?” she asked while focusing her attention on Garba’s face. At the moment, it has occurred to Garba that his best bet out of this awkward situation is to check her phone history and the massages and find a person that she is close to, which he can claim is his friend and is the one that referred him to the dealership; he found a person called Sani, who is a friend of hers.

“Sani told me all about you and the dealership, he is the one that told me your name” he responded.

Immediately, Garba can see Deborah’s face liven up with a feint smile.

“in that case, please follow me” se said and begin to lead Garba to the right side of the building where she opened a door to a showroom full of different cars.

“we unfortunately do not have any fully electric vehicle at the moment, but we do have one hybrid that uses both gas and an electric cell that charges as you drive using gas. It also has a wide solar panel on the roof. It is a new company and not many people want to try t but it has an excellent self drive feature that will be available soon in all parts of Abuja and …..…..”

“I’ll take it” Garba interrupted her.

“but you don’t even know the type of car it is, I have not told you the price tag on the vehicle yet” she responded in surprise.

“I believe you take payment with card right?” Garba said, bringing out his credit card.

The woman asked for the papers for the vehicle to be processed and registered in his name as she took him back to the reception where he made payment for the car and was taken to where he would see it before it would be sent to him right after it has been fully decorated for him.

However, as soon as Garba was in the car, he said.

“I am taking it with me, I will send someone to get the papers for me next week. I am late for an appointment so ask them to open the gate” Garba said.

The gate was opened and he drove out of the compound, straight to the nearest gas station where he intends to fill the car tank.

A few minutes away from the police station Garba was released from, agent delta and sigma are in their car driving around. Agent Delta was driving the car and Agent Sigma was busy on two laptop computers in the backseat and he has just received a notification.

“we have a tag on him at a dealership an hour drive from here, I have uploaded the location to the car map” said Agent Sigma.

“ I will get us there is thirty minutes” Delta said and swerve the car in the opposite direction and started to speedup along a highway. Some minutes later, the two arrived at Bright future car dealerships where they presented themselves as security operatives pursuing a deadly criminal that has killed five people and is currently on the run.

Deborah wasted no time in providing them with Garba’s vehicle description and information. The two agents collected the serial number of the vehicle and begin to track Garba’s car using the in-built car GPS. Within a minute, they were able to track the car to a nearby gas station; they got in their car and started heading towards the station.

Garba did not expect the tank of his new car to take this long without full, he has been waiting for fifteen minutes for it to fill up and it has just completed. He got in the car and started the engine, with the intention of driving all the way back to Kaduna, some two hundred kilometers distance.

In an instant, as Garba is about to drive out of the gas station, an SUV drove into the station in a skid and parked in front of his car. When he looks at the vehicle, he knows immediately that the very people he is trying to run away from have caught up with him. He put the car in reverse and started driving backwards to escape. He managed to get out of the filling station and got on the highway and a he expected, the SUV was right behind him in a chase.

****{secret facility facility)****

After the mysterious old man in Laboratory gown has given Mila a VR head set, with a wheezing sound in her ear, she fainted. The man brought out a syringe and emptied its contents in Mila’s body.

As soon as Mila put on the headset, she begin to feel dizzy and lightheaded, the VR headset is flashing an alternating flash of light that changes color with each blink, eventually, she passed out. She found herself on an airplane seated next to Garba who is by her right to the window and by her left sat the beautiful Asian woman that she has seen in flashback she had a few days ago.

Unlike the earlier flashback, she knows the woman’s name and it is Lucy. Lucy was part of the beta testing experiment or the Neuraface in Neuratechnologies but where are we heading to? The experiment should have taken place in the Mega building so where are we heading to on a plane? She thought. Mila could already tell that she is not dreaming and what she is seeing has in fact happened so a memory flashback is more appropriate name to call it.

Some people in sky blue dresses came out and started giving food to all of the passengers onboard. Mila an the rest of the took the food and ate. A few minutes later, as if in a skip, she suddenly found herself in a facility convinced that she was taken there by a bus, however she is now sure that she was on a plane a while ago. The only one among the volunteers to suspect the same was Garba.

A few days later in the flashback that she is experiencing, she was in a glitchy space talking to an artificial intelligence called MEDULLA which has hacked into her Neuraface and unlocked its full potential by changing the operating system it uses. MEDULLA took her to a place where she was able to view a part of Garba’s most painful memories.

In another blink, she was back in the underground facility in Garba’s body fighting a bulky man in Military uniform, his name is Carson and he was the one that killed Mila. She watched as Garba and her killed this guy, in another blink she was back in the Mega building where everyone is believes that all of what she has experienced just now didn’t happen because Akihiro has wiped out her and Garba’s memories.

“Akihiro, that is his name, Dr. Akihiro Amida the mastermind behind the entire cruel experiment that gathered people and made them kill each other convinced they were playing a game” she said to herself. A sharp pain emanated from her forehead and she wakes up from her dream with a VR headset on her head. She quickly removed the VR headset and threw it on the floor and as soon as she looks up, the man was seated on his chair with his two armed guards behind him observing her.

“You are Akihiro Amida and I hope you know what will happen now that you have broken Reece’s agreement”. She said to Akihiro in a threatening tone.

“hahahaha…….it really seams to have worked since not only did you remember who I am, but you also remembered my able competitor Dr. Reece Mallory who almost destroyed my greatest creation. But I have bad news for you, MEDULLA is gone and so will be Mallory Reece soon”. Akihiro said and before he could continue to talk, his phone begin to ring so he pulled it out of the breast pocket of his lab coat and answered it.

Mila watched the old man’s face brighten up with a crooked smile as he raises his head to look at her in the eye before ending the call and putting the phone back.

“this came just on time, Reece Mallory is dead too, she was as smart and resilient as ever, she cost Lockwood a lot of money but in the end, we got what we want and in fact, Garba is being pursued as we speak; very soon he will be brought here too. This time around I hope the two of you get to entertain our hosts well” he said.

Mila was greatly saddened by Reece’s death, she was relieved to find out they are not killing Garba but capturing him and intend on bringing him here as well. But what Akihiro doesn’t seem to know s that Mil and Garba have been crossing minds over and over again. Whatever alternative they must have for MEDULLA, whatever method they used to know we were communicating with Medulla must not have shown them that we were able to cross minds.

But she also has hope that she will be able to get the hell out of whatever this place soon because since she awaken after fainting and regaining her memories, a status bar has appeared in her field of vision as a virtual projection with a massage on top of it that reads “SYSTEM REBOOTING” and it is currently at 95% progress. As Akihiro was leaving the room after saying a few more things to her, the system reboot completed, all the functions of her Neuraface have been restored.

She quickly sent a massage to Garba that says “Hi Garba, this is Mila, where are you right now? Be careful. Neuratechnologies has sent people to capture you”.

Back in Abuja Nigeria, Garba has been racing through traffic on a highway trying to escape Agents Delta and Sigma who were chasing him in an SUV.

He has managed to gain some distance from them due to the many cars on the road, he took a left turn and got off the highway hoping that he will finally lose them.

As he changed lanes to a road he has no idea where it leads to, Garba feels a little light headed and a slight biting pain is manifesting in his head. All of a sudden, a projection appeared in his vision. It is a medium sized floating window with a massage on it from Mila asking him where he is and warning him to be careful of Neuratechnologies Agents sent after him which he quickly thought was kind of late.

“What the hell is going on? I don’t understand. I thought only phones and computers of any kind that I can access but why am I getting a massage from Mila, how do I even begin to answer her” he shouted out loud and for a few seconds, he saw many projections on his Field of Vision, almost covering his entire view and in an instant, they were gone again leaving a single massage on a floating icon.

“Crossing minds with Mila Goldenberg count down” it says with a timer counting down to zero. Currently at 10 seconds.

“Wait, what the hell is happening, what is going on?” he shouted from confusion.

Back at the secret facility Mila is being held in, she has earlier accessed the local Wi-Fi network in the facility and within a few minutes she has re-establish her connection with a internet accessibility by cloning and masking her Neuraface as a SIM card, allowing her to h****k a local service provider satellite. For the last minute since her connection, she has been trying to navigate and find out where she is but to no avail.

The map application on her Neuraface keeps showing her location to be an random place in the middle of the sea but Mila knows fully well that this could not be the sea since even the slightest movement of a ship on water will make her throw up. While in the process of trying to find out the location of where she is being held, Mila blinks her eyes once and the next second, a massage appears in her field of vision saying “Crossing minds complete. In one blink of her eyes, she was seated detained in the facility and in another blink she was in a car speeding up on a road that is slowly leading her out of town. She took a single glance at the mirror and instantly knows she is back in Garba’s body again.

Without hesitation, she grabbed the steering wheel harder and begin to slow down the car to find out what the hell is going on but from behind, another car drove right into the back of her car at high speed and from its windows, a person son wearing black suit started shooting at her while another one in similar dressing was driving the car.

“God damn it! Why does this keep happening to me”. She shouted angrily and stepped on the gas, speeding up more.