(This is only the second draft of the book Worthless. Expect typos, plot holes, odd subplots and the occassionally wrongly named character, especially minor characters. It is made public only to give people a rough idea of how the final story will look)

Chapter 54

It was a nice and very clean table. The chair was almost as clean, a few scoff marks on its legs from fidgety customers. The air was temperate, warm enough not to freeze, cool enough not to sweat. There was a wiff of roasted meat in the air, the succulent scent of warm kebab.
"Hello, Marie. How are you doing?"
It was Daniel. He spoke slowly and clearly, as if he feared that he would not be understood otherwise. He was nicely dressed, clean checkered shirt with a speckled grey T under it. And although his face seemed a bit sedated and overly calm, there was a concern in his eyes as he spoke.
"Hi, Danny. Fine."
In the brief intermittent pause, he failed to make eye contact several times. His calm exterior seemed to be covering something, something that really, really bugged the hell out of him. But nothing about him hinted at what, exactly, that might be.
"Why? I mean, how are you? And why do you ask?"
There was a stilted quality to the whole thing, like Daniel was rehearsing lines to a play or a movie. The only thing that even seemed to break that facade was his constant unrest, shown in small movements, and in the constant breaks of eye contact.
"Daniel, are we being watched?"
The question, even though whispered, made him visibly flinch. He leaned in, at first as if to whisper back, but it quickly became obvious that he just needed to wring his hands and needed room on the table for that.
"Marie, listen carefully to me. You're in the hospital."
For a fraction of a second, the volume seemed to drop out of the surrounding sound, as if someone cut the feed to the speakers of reality. But then, almost as if reality noticed, everything was briefly turned up, and a handful of teens came into the diner, talking and laughing rathre loudly. Their sounds faded as they began to debate what to eat, but by then, the noise had done its job of preventing any silence from making a mark.
"Is this... What is this, then? A dream? Wait, I'm not dead, right? Right?!"
The words came rushing out too fast to really control, but Daniel quickly made calming gestures with his hands. They could be seen as someone just trying to make someone else not act inappropriately, but they felt more intense, more personal to him.
"Please, Marie," he outright begged, his voice about to crack, "you need to stay calm. Your body can't handle much stress."
Looking down, there was nothing to see that supported his warning. The jumpsuit was gone, replaced with a breezy blouse over a tight top, and what appeared to be old sweatpants. Appeared to be...
"Daniel, why am I unsure what kind of pants I'm wearing?"
"Because you're not wearing any," he sighed, nervously cupping his mouth and nose in his hands. "You're in a hospital bed. You're wearing bandages and medical microbots."
Looking down again, this time for much longer, the sweatpants took on a sinister dimension. They felt unreal, even ghostly. Ghostly sweatpants.
"Medical microbots?"
Daniel nodded.
"That's not a 2019 technology."
Daniel shook his head.
"Thats... are we post-2250?"
Daniel nodded.
"Danny, what the #*@! is going on?"
"You timed out healthy, but when you timed back in... Jesus #*@!ing Christ, Marie, there was barely anything left of you."
He sounded honestly torn up at the thought of what he described, voice quivering and his eyes looking anywhere but straight ahead.
"Where am... Where is... I want to see me. I want to see my body, Danny."
Finally making eye contact, he looked terrified at the prospect! Holding up both hands as if they were a physical blockade, he shook his head wildly.
"No, no, no. No, Marie, you don't w..."
"Show me."
"Marie, you need to keep ca..."
"Show me my #*@!ing body."
"M..."
"Now!"
In perhaps the one and only way he could do something unexpected, Daniel's entire body seemed to freeze in mid motion, like a video game character put on pause. After a few seconds, he began moving again.
"What the #*@! just happened there, Danny?"
Suddenly much calmer, he put his hands on the table. He still looked tortured about the whole ordeal, but at least he was not in a panic.
"We paused. Your vitals were going off the charts, we needed to get you..."
"Paused? Is this..."
The entire place suddenly seemed as weird to look at as the pants.
"Of course. This is just a simulation, isn't it? I'm hooked up to some brain rig, playing a game with you in some virtual world. For #*@!'s sake, Daniel, is this..."
"Necessary?" he intrrupted. "Yes. Very."
For whatever reason, for whatever idea had popped into the head of someone running the entire thing, one of the diner's staff members came over with a large portion of french fries and a soda for each.
"Virtual food? Oh wow, you really shouldn't have."
With a sigh and a shrug, Daniel actually took one of the fries, dipping it in the small cup of ketchup and biting down on it. He looked either not very pleased, or just plain surprised at what he tasted. Neither option was that enticing.
"We need to keep you in a calm state. This is one of your favorite lunch places back home, it seemed like the best option to put your mind at ease while we talk."
He wasn't lying. The place had been open a few years back home, but the staff was always nice and cheerful, and  the food was good and cheap. It had become a safe place to meet and talk business when not at The Embassy itself in Nakskov, and just as good a place to simply kick back on an extended break in town. It was a good choice. But not good enough.
"I need to see my body, Danny. I need to know how bad it is."
"It's bad, isn't that enough?"
"Not if you want to keep me calm. If I can't see it, I'll imagine far worse."
Putting down the soda and hesitantly trying another virtual fry, Daniel leaned back, looking a little defeated.
"They're not good at simulating fries," he mumbled out loud. "It's the salt. The taste is there, but I don't feel it on my tongue. It's kinda freaky."
"Danny, focus! Me, body, see. Now."
He sighed, limply dropping the fry on the table. Without saying anything, he made eye contact again, the look of defeat now practically radiating out from him.
"You won't like this," he said softly.
"I don't expect to."
The diner dissolved. It wasn't quite like when movies showed dream worlds or even virtual worlds. No soft fadeout, but no fancy wireframe graphics, either. Things just flickered quickly and disappeared, one by one. People first, then the world outside, then everything except the table and the chairs. Then the table and the chairs.
It was all replaced very quickly, though. It felt like floating, hovering above a brilliantly white bed, kept in a large transparent tube, shaped like a pill. And in it, a small body. More or less.
"You came back screaming," Daniel said without being asked. "You actually screamed until you were spitting blood. I never saw anything like it."
It looked like some straneg girl. Same hair, same color and cut. Same skin, same freckles. Same size. But the girl in the bed was barely even there. Skin and bones. Sores, bruises, spots of skin so pale it looked dead, spots of skin so dark it was clearly dying. Burns. Some black and brown, skin peeling like grilled pork. Some bloody, covered in semi-transparent bandages with thin tubes attached, most likely to keep them moist and apply assorted drugs.
"Am I even alive?"
"Your brain is," he replied calmly. "Obviously, I mean. But the rest... #*@!, Marie. They wanted to amputate about half of you. Your kidneys looked like they'd been sundried. I can still feel the bones in your fingers snapping when I..."
He paused again, his virtual body freezing for a split second. Then he was back, but silent.
"When you what?"
"Sorry?"
He seemed momentarily out of it, like someone waking from a daydream.
"You said you felt my finger bones snap when you did something?"
He looked very confused, his eyes constantly skipping to the badly damage body in the hospital bed.
"Daniel, how long did you just pause for?"
His eyes looked tired again, like the simulation was refusing to show him actually crying.
"Three weeks."
There was a weird sound from the pill-shaped bed containment thing. It seemed to be measuring something change.
"Is this... is this live footage? Is this me right now? Was that sound measuring me reacting to what you said?"
Daniel nodded.
"It's not running at full rate, but yeah, that's you, right now."
"Why not at full rate?"
"We need to keep you on limited neural activity. Your brain has been set to 30% signal speed, so what you're seeing is roughly a third of what's going on."
There was nobody walking around the bed, so there were no human movements to compare time to, only robots that moved at speeds that could be anything. There was no way to tell if he was lying, really, but then again, he had no need to lie. The truth was bad enough.
"So the world moves at about three times normal speed, from my perspective. Never tried that before."
It was a bit surprising, but looking quietly at the bed was calming. It felt weird, looking at oneself, possibly hanging between life and death, but there was something peaceful about it.
"Marie, we need to talk about what you saw. Just in..."
He stopped himself, suddenly looking strangely embarrassed.
"Just in case I never wake up."
"Yes."
It was perfectly rational, even sensible. It could be important information, for all they knew. Losing that kind of information was a bad tactic.
"You got something more.... nature?"
For once, Daniel actually smiled, and the live feed from the hospital bed disappeared. This time, it faded out as a full image, unlike the virtual worlds created by whatever they had running the simulation. Fields appeared instead. The simulation started with what was close by, leaving the rest a yellowish haze, as if blinded by the sun. But bit by bit, over a few seconds, everything came into crystal clear view.
"Is this Nakskov?"
It was an unfair question to ask. Daniel knew only some parts of the place, mainly those right by The Embassy and places in the town itself. The nature around it was harder to know in detail, at least for outsiders.
"Closer to Halsted, but yeah, it's in the vicinity," he said softly, sounding like a tour guide reading from a pamphlet. "Around 2010. Most of the woodlands are gone, now, to make room for even more fields."
"Yeah. Fertile soil, ripe for agriculture."
The simulation was pretty impressive. Birds took off in the distance, hares could be seen jumping along the edge of the treeline. There was even a family of deer, complete with two very young ones, grazing in the distance.
"What happened out there, Marie? What did you find out?"
The simulation was a temptation. It made the brain want to fade into it, to believe that it was real and that reality was just a bad dream. Forcing memories back into focus was like pulling a splinter out of that brain. Painful, even if well-intended. And while pulling at it, other memories came rushing back. Memories of being ripped out from the age of magic, right before the dragon's talons dug in. A brief glimpse of being ripped through the cavern where Kehu scraped up black dust, through the artificial worlds made by the Wenway group to coax out information. The old mansion, the pirate fort, the raging battle in Prussia. It all tore through like wild dogs, clawing at everything, dragging scars in the dirt.
"Something is wrong, Danny. Something is very wrong."
"It's okay, we'll up the painkillers, lower neural to..."
"No, not me. Not with me."
How the simulation worked was still a bit unclear, but Daniel's virtual body actually rushed in to help. The words made him stop midway, though.
"Daniel, there's something wrong with... I don't know, maybe with time, or history. Or maybe just with how we..."
The words written in the old mansion, the hidden words, kept reappearing, like a beacon in the mind.
"We're not originals. We're not... We're not the original."
Everything seemed to slowly stabilize. Up became up, down became down, and things stopped being blurry and spinning.
"We're not original what?" asked Daniel, sounding as confused as could honestly be expected.
Sitting down was a weird experience. The simulation got the slight chill and soft sensation of sitting down in the field pretty spot on, but it felt too comfortable.
"The woman in white used to clean up colonies far back in time. I mean, like, at the end of the last ice age. The whole spirit energy thing was just rampant back then, with peolpe that might as well have been wizards or something. And huge monsters, like dragons. #*@!ing Lord of the Rings kind of place."
The heavy breathing had to be a mental thing. It seemed like something a simulation might skip, even when connected to a hospital bed.
"Okay, never heard any of the refugees talk about that," Daniel said, soundnig very skeptical.
"No. No, we wouldn't hear about those. They got away on their own. Well, a few, from what I could tell. I'm pretty sure they went into hiding. But somewhere along the way, they ended up poking at history, and I think they nudged it off course."
Suddenly, the symbol from all the paintings and from the abandoned bunker popped up, like clouds parting and showing the sky!
"Look, this symbol. What is it?"
there was nothing to draw on but the dirt itself, but it did the trick. A symmetric cross, and the four bars that formed a circle.
"It's a Swaztika," Daniel answered calmly.
"No, it's something else. There were no normal Swaztikas anywhere."
It looked uncanny, like some form of magic, as Daniel replicated the symbol in the air, drawing over the lines in the dirt with black lines from his fingertips. Once the symbol was reproduced, he turned it in the air, inspecting it closely.
"You running a search on it?"
"Yeah, just... I'm still learning the interface here," he answered. There was a pause, neither saying a word, but a question had begun to burn.
"Daniel, how long have you sat by my side in this place?"
Although he smiled, there was a sadness to him as he let the symbol hang in the air for a few seconds.
"Little over five months, I guess."
Again, a silence.
"Look," he sighed, taking his eyes off the floating symbol, "all those years back, you and The Embassy took a chance on me, and you basically saved my ass. I'd have to be a royal prick not to return the favor, right? Plus, I carried you into the time machine when we went here, so if I go back, you go back with me. Not gonna happen, not until you're up and walking."
Even though he was clearly tired beyond belief, he smiled, and the smile seemed gnuine.
"Wait, if you carried me, what about... did you, you know, get geared up for, uhm, the guy thing?"
And finally, he actually laughed!
"Yes, I put on that god awful jock strap, and it hurt like hell, but I should still be able to be a daddy one day, other injuries notwithstanding."
Seeing him smile, and hearing him confirm that nothinghad gone horribly wrong, felt like a huge rock breaking off the heart.
"Anyway, I think I got the search function to work. It's all mental symbolism, you know, using non-essential neural processes to..."
"Nerd."
"Sorry, I don't get to go to the future and play with their tech much, you know!" he complained, but with a playful tone to his voice. "Anyway, it's actually a kind of pre-Nazi Swaztika. It's from the Thule society, some weird group of occultists with a hard-on for German folklore. They were a big part of getting Hitler started, but he basically screwed them over early on and kicked the whole thing out. I guess he just used this thing as an inspiration for the Swaztika we know."
Every afsterschool special and late night documentary about WWII began playing in some weird memory space. Pieces, bits and pieces, all tried to fit together.
"So if Hitler had never done that, the group might have used this symbol instead?"
Daniel shrugged, but nodded.
"Danny, did you ever hear that whole thing about whether you would go back and kill Hitler if you had a time machine?"
Although first looking a bit perplexed, he slowly nodded.
"I think someone actually did. I think someone broke history, and now there's an alternate one out there, one where these Thule farts ran the war."
"What's that got to do with anything? I mean, you went back to..."
"I think some of the refugees that escaped back then saw Hitler coming and killed him. And I think that our woman in white is trying to hunt them down to stop them."
"And the big machines? The ones that your spirit energies got so worked up about?"
There were pieces missing. Most of it fit together, but there were still pieces missing.
"I think she's trying to destroy the energy."
"Destroy.... energy?"
"Destroy, dampen, whatever. She wants to stiffle them."
Looking at Daniel was like looking at a small child listening to a chemistry lecture. He understood some basic points, but the rest was just a haze to him.
"You didn't see what they can do, Danny. If I was her, I'd try to handicap them, too. Handicap them before... striking."
That, he understood.