In a rundown apartment, a little boy sat up in shock, before curling up due to the pain ravaging his body. He was dirty with short black hair and sunken black eyes with a bony complexion due to malnourishment. After a while, the boy stopped shivering before he slowly opened his eyes as he looked around the room with a look of confusion on his face. 'Where is my bed? How did I get here?' the boy wondered, 'The last thing I remember was going to sleep in pain. I hope they are not thinking about harvesting my organs, since they have been ruined by the medication I have been taking.' That was when a jolt of pain shot thru his head forcing him to wince as images started to flash in his mind. Fade's heart raced as he tried to piece together the fragments of his past life. He remembered being a researcher at a think tank, but then everything goes blank as he tries to remember his death. Now, he found himself in a small, dimly lit closet with a blanket on the floor.
As he sat cross-legged, his mind raced with memories of his new life. He recalled that his father dead before he was born and his mother's subsequent descent into despair. She had been a beauty with long black hair and black eye's, with fair, jade, like skin, her beauty insured she could have had anyone she wanted. But due to her depression from the loss of her husband while caring for a newborn, she had dated a series of abusive men until the day she died of an illness when he was just four years old. The last of these men claimed that Fade's mother had left him in his care so he could use him to claim government assistance for food. Now it was almost a full year since he started living with the man being forced to clean and cook around the apartment. While at times, when the fatso had drunk or gambled all of the money away, he would for the old me to go begging on the streets. Where the old me would get beaten or robbed until he learned the unspoken rules of the street, "Wealth is a sin for the weak".
Fade knew that he couldn't waste this life being timid and obedient. He needed to take control of his destiny and make something of himself. And so, he devised a plan to steal the holodeck from his stepfather. The holodeck was a multifunctional device, serving as a wallet, identification card, and cellphone. It was also a valuable item, as the most expensive versions came with advanced features like AI assistance, GPS, and wireless connectivity.
'Well, the least I can do is fulfill the kids last wish,' I thought to myself, while remembering the kid's life until now, 'But seriously, the kid had no plan on what to do after he got his hands on the holodeck. Hmm, I don't know anything about this world, so it would be best to gather as much info about this place that I can before deciding my next step.' Fade remembered that the bumbling buffoon that is his stepfather wore the holodeck on his wrist like a bracelet. He waited until the man was asleep in his room, before sneaking into the room and then carefully removed it from his wrist. The device was heavier than he expected, and he could imagine the power humming beneath his fingers. With the holodeck in his possession, Fade felt a surge of confidence. He knew that he could use it to his advantage, to find a better life for himself. He just had to figure out how to use it properly. 'First, I need to get out of here, if that moron wakes up and sees me with this thing he might beat me half to death again,' Fade thought to himself remembering the beating the kid got which caused him to be reborn here.
As he left the room, he could hear his stepfather stirring in his sleep. Fade knew that he had to be careful, that he couldn't afford to get caught. His heart raced as he tip toed his way to the front door before, he slipped out of the house and into the night, his heart pounding in his chest. He knew that he still had a long way to go, but he was determined to make something of himself. With the holodeck at his side, he felt like anything was possible. And he was ready to take on whatever challenges lay ahead.
As Fade walked through the streets, he marveled at the advanced technology around him. He saw people wearing bracers that served as holodecks, with robots taking out the trash or walking around, and he wondered what other wonders the future held. Unfortunately, it looked like he lived in the slums so everything he saw was in various forms of disrepair. He knew that he had a lot to learn, but he was eager to explore this new world. 'If I remember correctly, the market is nearby, plenty of nooks I can hide in with a constant flow of people that would provide me with a good distraction should the moron come looking,' Fade thought to himself. He decided to head to the nearest market, hoping to find a safe place away from prying eyes but public enough to prevent anything from happening until he learned how to use the holodeck. As he walked through the bustling market, the child inside him felt a sense of excitement and anticipation. While the adult memories tried to keep him calm and focused. 'Feels like I have multiple personality disorder,' Fade say's inside his head as he gives it a quick shake to refocus himself, 'I hope my mind finishes adjusting soon, people will think I'm psycho of act like a child but speak like an adult.'
Finding a gap between some food stalls that could hide him from view, he slipped inside when no one was looking. He got comfortable before he pulled the bracer out from under his shirt and put it on. Once it was on it connected to the chip in his hand as all citizens get one when they are born in the empire, before he started to read the data on it. Unfortunately, it showed that the device was locked, but having worked with computers as he scientist he knew a few tricks. 'And people used to tell me that being a jack of all trades, master of none was a bad career move,' Fade thought to himself with a smirk while fiddling with the bracelet, 'No matter how advanced technology is, they all come with a factory reset as precautions. It just takes some poking around to find it. I don't see any pinholes.' First, he checked to see if there was a way to reset the factory settings from the outside, but after a few minutes of searching, he could not find anything. Leaving him with the only option of trying to program it to reset, and with the difference in technology he had no idea if it would work.
Time passed as he went thru the available programs on the holodecks screen. Getting the command prompt to come up was actually very easy since it was in the same method he learned in his previous life. The hard part was finding the correct way of entering the command into the bracer so it would do what he wanted. The food stalls closed up late into the night, long before he found the correct method, but once he did, he felt reinvigorated. 'That may not have been exhausting physically, but mentally, I am worn out,' Fade thought as he let out a sigh in relief.
After entering the command, it still took more time to wipe all the data from the previous owner before it would reset. Once it was done, he did not wait any longer to begin registering it to himself and then checking all the available features that it had. Unfortunately, it was only the most basic model limiting its features to calling, paying, and using the net. He first decided to learn things that were immediately important to his survival, like the planet he lived on was name "Gaid" which was a part of the human empire, and that they buy things using digital credits thru holodecks.
He then looked into the wallet program on the bracer, and like he suspected, it was empty since he deleted his stepfather's data. Seeing the program request a digital address to use for storage and trading credits he decided to use the same one from his old life. In his old life credits had just started being used before his death since it was untraceable by the government and banks, but that also meant that it was not insured, so if you forgot your digital address your money would disappear forever. 'No point in trying to create and memorize a new code if I still remember my old one. Like that old saying goes "If it isn't broke, don't fix it",' Fade thought to himself as he started to input the address of his digital wallet. Fortunately, it was one of the things he remembered. After entering it, the device beeped a few times before giving him a message he never thought he would see. "ADDRESS CONFIRMED". 'Wait, what? Damn, is somebody already using it,' Fade thought to himself with a sigh, 'Well, why don't I try my password. Maybe I'm lucky enough that they also used the same one.' He knew there was no way it could truly be his original account, he just wanted to try it to lighten the mood, he entered the passkey that would give him access to the account fully expecting it to deny access.
He was surprisingly wrong, the device confirmed that the account was now connected to the device allowing payments to be made. 'You have got to be shitting me, I think my luck seems to be changing for the better,' Fade thought with a surprised look on his face. He had read a lot of books in his old life and new about reincarnations, but as a former scientist his mind immediately dismissed that theory because of a lack of realism. He thought to himself that the only form of reincarnation he knew about were when livings creatures passed on their memories to their decadents thru their DNA, with some being quiet literal. He shook his head at the absurdity of something like reincarnation from happening.
That was when he smacked himself on the head because he had just remembered that in his past life the think tank wanted to create a serum that would allow them to recall the memories of their ancestors. Since the project was sponsored by the government, we were able to skip the safety checks and test them on death row inmates. But after a few months of testing, nothing came from it, so we were eventually ordered to shut down the project. Having just finished creating a new version as a personal side project he decided to inject himself since he did not want all his work to be for nothing, but after a while nothing happened like every prior attempt.
The last thing he could check in order to prove his theory was to check his history. So, he went onto the net to check the historical timeline and sure enough, it told him the complete history of humans with everything he learned before his death reflected in front of him. It told him that it had been 5000 years since his last memory and also informed him of everything that happened to humans since. 'I am happy my research worked, but now I am agitated, because I would have needed to have a kid in order to pass on my genetic memory and I was single in my last memory,' Fade rubbed his head in exasperation, 'You know what, forget it. This is a new life, a second chance to do things I couldn't before, and live the life I wanted.'