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Chapter 1: Lost in the Jungle
The sun shone through pink leaves. I wondered where I was. Looking at my dark brown hands and hideous mustard yellow shirt and pants, I wondered who I was.
I was wearing no jewelry and had no tattoos that I could see.
There was something strange about the sun. Its light felt filtered. I could feel its warmth on my bare head but it felt muted. Despite that, the temperature was comfortable and the orange moss felt soft under my naked feet.
I felt like I was heading somewhere and I had to do something important, but I couldn’t remember.
A bird made a horrific shriek at a distance and I almost jumped out of my skin.
I felt my face and body, deciding I was definitely human or close enough to pass. That was an interesting thought, and it meant being not human was an option. I was definitely shaped like a woman, from the feel of my face and lack of pain in my joints, I assumed I was somewhere in my late twenties.
“Okay, look around. Figure out where you are, and find a village or town,” I whispered. Somehow saying it aloud made me feel more real. My voice was deep and feminine.
I was in a forest and seemed to have been walking on a path made of cushiony moss. The forest was painted in hues of pastel pink, blue, and violet. It could have been normal, but something deep inside me said that trees were not meant to be that colour.
If I’d been heading in the direction I was facing, I was going toward something or away from something; either way it made sense to keep moving.
The sky was white; that was unnerving. “If white is wrong, what colour is right?” I wondered out loud.
A large winged insect flew by me and my skin crawled. It was the size of my fist with a nasty-looking barb on its posterior.
The moss changed to something firmer, maybe some sort of wood. It was definitely something organic but artificially shaped. The bird shrieked again, sounding closer.
The forest was cleared in a perfect circle around one tree. This tree had a hard bark of royal blue and it was at least twice as tall as the rest of the forest.
As I got closer to the tree, I heard the telltale hum of electricity. I reached out toward the tree, and my hand was batted down forcefully by a large stick.
“Who are you?” demanded a lithe man with golden brown skin and a close-cropped haircut. My mind told me he must be military.
“Good question. I don’t know,” I replied, noticing he’d sharpened the end into a spear. He’d even carved it a little off centre so that the pointy part wasn’t made of the softer core of the branch.
I wonder what it says about me that I didn’t think to arm myself but could recognize the technique he’d used?
“Why don’t you know?” the man asked. It was a question but he sounded unsure.
“Probably the same reason you don’t,” I answered and pointed at the tree. “That’s not a regular tree.”
“You’re right, there’s some sort of computer inside it. It seems biological. I didn’t know that was possible. He lowered the spear and gently caressed the tree. “Why do you have a large M on your shirt?”
I looked down and saw he was right: in the center of the shirt was a large M. His shirt had a large T. “I don’t know. How do you know about the computer in the tree?”
The man put both hands on the tree and my vision swam. When it cleared, I could see a swirl of pink energy around him. He reached out and pushed the energy toward the tree.
Pain flared into my head. Electric shocks made my body convulse and I fell to the hard ground.
When it stopped, I saw that the man, who I was thinking of as T, was on the ground as well.
He sat up and grunted. I let my head stop swimming before doing the same.
“What the hell was that?” he asked, but it was a general ask, not a demand to me.
“I think we tried to use some sort of ability and were shocked into submission.”
He looked at me and then at our matching outfits before swearing in what I recognized as Sámi but wasn’t sure of which language exactly it was. I was surprised to realize that I understood him. “We’re prisoners,” he said finally.
It made complete sense. We had matching outfits that were obviously made for ease of wash not fashion, we had some sort of trigger device that shocked us… But why take our memory? “Where are our jailers?”
He looked angry for a moment, like he thought I was challenging him, but then he looked around nervously. “If they aren’t visible and they let me make a weapon, they must be watching from hidden cameras.”
“Or they are gone for the same reason we can’t remember who we are?”
That idea was frightening. Being stuck in a jail without jailers meant that unless we could escape, we’d eventually run out of food.
Thinking of food, my stomach growled. Nothing around me looked edible and there was nothing in my pocket.
“Where do we get food?” I asked him.
Again I heard the strange bird, much closer this time, and he must have also, because he said, “Where there are animals, there’s game.”
The bird made another horrifying screech, which was echoed by two others behind us.
Suddenly, we were surrounded by three massive dog-like creatures. My mind supplied ‘Warg’ but that wasn’t possible, because they were fictional. At least that’s what my mind was telling me.
Fictional or not, they were approaching us, and they looked hungrier than I felt.
Read Chapter 2 (February 2026)
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