Transliterated [Xenofiction Isekai]

My name is Lucas Goddard. If you are able to read this, then I'm sorry. I failed. I've done everything I can, undone as many protocols as I could without compromising the wider network. I've sacrificed the lives and homes of thousands of innocents to hopefully save countless more. I do not know if it will be enough. You shouldn't have to be burdened by my sins, but the simple fact that you are here to read this means that you have been.

No one should have to make these kinds of choices. I can only hope that, once you know why I made mine, you will be able to make your own.

He had never been much of a morning person, but today, waking up was the most exciting event of his entire life. He had absolutely no idea what he had woken up as. They'd been able to narrow the targeting parameters somewhat to exclude many undesirable species as potential host candidates, but pairing a consciousness imprint with an organic brain relied on compatibility factors completely independent of the species itself. All he knew was that he'd been paired with whatever had been deemed the "most stable" host for his particular thought patterns.

Okay. Standard operating procedure, just like practice. Non-visual body check comes first. Need to get a baseline for proprioception.

His body was long, that much was immediately obvious. Warm, too, so probably a mammal. Four legs, short relative to the body, and a long tail.

Mustelid, I think? Too thin to be a badger. Maybe a weasel? He flexed his "hands" to confirm their dexterity. That's good. Means I'll have workable paws for simple tool use. Such things wouldn't be strictly necessary for his mission, of course, but the convenience would be nice. Next, visual assessment. Figure out where I am, and which direction I need to go in.

He opened his eyes to blurry patches of light dancing across a brown background. Awkwardly rolling onto his feet, he struggled to stand. Coordinating four legs turned out to be much more complex of a task than he could have anticipated, but he'd known going in that the imprinting process couldn't account for muscle memory ahead of time. After about a minute of trembling and slipping, he managed to stand and keep his footing, taking the opportunity to crane his neck backwards to examine himself.

He was an otter, apparently, though he wasn't sure of the particular species. It did explain his apparent nearsightedness, since an otter's eyes seemed to be made for underwater vision. He'd been given a crash course in biology prior to making his imprint, but he was far from knowledgeable in anything beyond the basics. He was a network engineer, knowing the sensory capabilities of individual animal species was about as far out of his wheelhouse as he could get.

Turning his attention to his surroundings, something struck the newly-minted otter as strange.

I'm inside of something, he noted, craning his neck upward to note the lack of either sky or foliage. But this is too big for a burrow, isn't it? And too well-lit. The sunlight in an enclosed space was the easiest thing to investigate, since it simply involved moving close enough to the source to make out details. What he found, though, quickly transformed his confusion into outright panic.

This is a window. The otter reached up with a forepaw to confirm with touch what he refused to believe with just his eyes. A round hole had been carved out of what appeared to be a mudbrick wall, sanded smooth, and fitted with a roughly made pane of glass. The glass was bumpy, clouded by impurities, and slightly yellowed, but it was artificially created glass. Something that should not exist in this world, not yet.

In fact, he wasn't in a den or burrow at all. He slowly made his way around the edges of the room—and it was a room, not a cavern or pit—feeling the walls and examining their make. It was mudbrick, clearly baked in an oven. The kind of thing he'd seen in museums as a kid. Something that ordinary animals couldn't make.

Something's gone wrong. Were other imprints activated early? Or was I activated late? Why are we using these primitive building techniques? We prepped designs for far more robust shelters to be made with the natural resources available here. In one corner of the room, he found a large, nest-like bed made of blankets lining a woven basket frame. One with his own scent on it, as well as one belonging to something else. The otter had been using that bed, living in this house, long before his imprint was activated. There was only one possible explanation.

They had made a terrible mistake.

There wasn't supposed to be a civilization here when we woke up. In fact, safeguards were built into the design of the project explicitly to prevent such a thing from happening. Higher order primates, the species thought to be capable of developing in such a way in the available time if given a nudge, had been excluded from the seeded populations, and un-imprinted animals were not supposed to have access to external processing.

But there was. If you travel far enough from where you found this journal, you'll be able to reach it. And that changed everything.

"It is going to be okay. Please calm down…" Hunter Sleek-Stream had returned home to find its housemate in the midst of some kind of mental breakdown. It was panicked, its expressions strange and malformed, and it did not react to Sleek-Stream with familiarity even as the frightened otter desperately embraced it.

"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry…" it whimpered. Its forepaws dug into Sleek-Steam's fur, clinging to it as if its life depended on it.

"Amber-Dreams, what happened? Whatever it is, we will work through it. We always have."

This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

"Amber-Dreams…" Sleek-Stream's hunting partner expressed its own name as if it had heard it for the first time, only to break down further, its apologies collapsing into unintelligible despair and guilt.

I was sent here with a simple mission. I was to confirm the operation of the relay network and report on its status. It certainly seemed functional, the "Gift of Understanding," as the locals call it, was proof enough of that. But none of that mattered in the face of the locals existing in the first place. The longer I spent with them, the more certain I was of a simple truth: They were people. Independent, thinking, reasoning, emotional beings. It didn't matter if they weren't human. They were real, and imprinting myself on one of them had taken its life.

I couldn't let it happen to anyone else.

"I'm going to be fine. I think I just need to get out of the house for a few days and order my thoughts." The ex-human did his best to pretend to be Amber-Dreams. He knew he was doing a terrible job of it, but all he needed was for the other otter to let him go. Them being concerned didn't matter in the grand scheme. The only thing that did was reaching the nearest relay. Once he did, then he could report that the project was a bust and extract himself to restore the real Amber-Dreams.

"No," the natural otter growled, concern morphing to hostility in an instant. "First you break down in despair apologizing, and then you begin lying to me about it! Why would you even believe you could do that?" They took several steps forward, teeth bared, angling themselves to block the exit as they did. "What is my name? Who am I?"

"You- you're-" The human's squeaks halted and stuttered as he desperately tried to access memories he didn't have, to recall a life he had not lived. His failure only confirmed their suspicions. Before he could even think of anything to say, he found himself tackled and pinned, sharp fangs pressed against the back of his neck.

"Who are you, and what have you done to Amber-Dreams?"

"I'm… My name is… It's…" He couldn't properly express his name in a way the otter could comprehend. He'd known that this would be the case, that when it came time to finally start awakening other imprints they would have to rename themselves in a strictly conceptual manner. But he hadn't come up with his own yet, and he wasn't supposed to need to for quite some time. "I don't know."

Whatever had been holding him back suddenly snapped, and he began an earnest attempt to explain everything.

"I don't know my name, but I know what I am, and I know what I need to do to get Amber-Dreams back."

If you are going to do what you need to do, there are some things I will need to explain. I don't know everything, I only worked on a small part of the project, and some things outside my specialty are beyond me. However, if I set things up right, you're probably among the older imprints. The ones from before any of this was public knowledge. The ones taken without consent. You deserve justice too, so I'm going to do my best.

Some time in the mid-2000's—I was never told the exact date—the Earth encountered an anomaly. There was a hole in reality, a fixed point in space that our planet just barely brushed past as it spun through the void. It had intersected the Earth's surface across a swathe of forest in rural Montana, affecting everything it came in contact with. The end result was a large burst of unknown radiation and… not much else. Not until the government thoroughly investigated the incident, at least.

Nothing about anything in the area seemed to be changed, at least, not until they put a soil sample into a spectrometer. The sample readings came back perfectly normal, and then an hour later the scientists were informed that another pulse of that strange radiation had occurred at the site in Montana, hours away from the lab, at the exact moment the spectrometer reading had been taken.

To make a long story I only half-understand short, everything in that area became entangled, or "linked," with matter on the other side of the hole, and that radiation is the result of observing the properties of the entangled matter and "updating" the properties of the matter on the other side. All of it, not just the measured stuff, which I was told flies in the face of even the very few things we've actually figured out about quantum mechanics.

The best way I had it explained to me went something like this: It's basically the "Schrödinger's Cat" idea, but if learning whether the cat was alive or dead also somehow decided the status of every other cat in the world at the same time. Eventually, they figured out how to exploit this physics breaking nonsense enough for me to come into the picture.

"A Maker." The native otter blinked at him, slowly processing whatever conclusion they seemed to have come to. "You are one of the Makers."

"...I don't know what that means." The former human sighed, sinking further into the pile of blankets that he'd been provided separate from the one bed in the room, at his insistence. He'd tried to explain things in as simple terms as he could, but he could tell that anything remotely technical was getting mangled by a lack of context, and when it came to his own knowledge of things, everything was technical.

"Those Who Came Before," the otter murmured, bowing their head in apparent reverence. "Creators of the Beacons, proof of Understanding that predates our own. Those whose Gift allows us to aspire to Their greatness."

Beacons… They found the entanglement relays, and correctly deduced that they were the source of their "Gift." The first part wasn't surprising. The relays were explicitly designed to be easy to find, otherwise it'd be difficult for him to do his job. But to discern their function, even in simplistic terms, would require scientific drive and curiosity. The native animals hadn't just been made smarter, they'd become motivated to learn and grow.

And then they'd turned that fact into a religion, with the presumptive nature of humanity at its center.

"Look, uh…" He realized he'd never gotten the otter's name. He knew they had a name, he was currently inhabiting the body of someone named "Amber-Dreams," but his own lack of name was messing with how he thought about any of this. "What's your name?"

"Hunter Sleek-Stream," the otter replied. It seemed that they included titles as part of their full, formal names.

"Thanks. Look, Sleek-Stream. I'm not a 'Maker.'"

"You just explained that your former species created the Beacons, despite not knowing their importance to us. Your species are the Makers."

"Okay, but what I mean is that I'm not a god. I'm not someone you should be worshiping. I'm just an engineer who worked on a tiny part of all this. It's a job, not a divine mandate."

This gave Sleek-Stream pause. They huffed without expressing anything, resting their chin on the edge of their bed as they appraised him. They were just barely close enough that the two of them could see each other, but the details were still blurry. After a few more minutes of staring and thinking, it growled out a rather unexpected conclusion.

"It seems that you were mistaken, Engineer. You do know your name, at least in part."

The human couldn't help but smile at that, making a strange, toothy expression that confused Sleek-Stream for a moment before they properly Understood the intent. They were right. Engineer was his name. At least in part.

And he still had a job to do.