Incubation 1.1

Disorientation.

From nothingness, there emerged a kaleidoscopic jumble of sensations.

Once the avalanche of perceptions were broken down into inputs of sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch, they became recognizable. The feeling of hard, wet ground below. The sound of rushing water. The smell of damp and rot. The taste of cotton and coppery blood. Darkness.

His first conscious thought was that he was awake, and he was not at all happy about that. The nausea was slowly replaced by a dull ache all over, accompanied by sharp, insistent pangs of hunger.

As daunting as the thought of moving was, he was so profoundly uncomfortable lying in this position that he couldn't take it anymore. He opened his eyes, not that it made much difference. It was almost as dark with his eyes open. His whole body was suffused with a strange sensitivity, as if someone had cranked his body's proprioception up to 11 and then thrown some crazy synesthesia into the mix. It even felt like he was tasting through his skin—or rather there was a sensation coming from his skin that was similar to taste. At the same time, he felt oddly hollow, as if random patches of his insides were numb. The parts that weren't numb felt like they were shifting around, splitting and flowing into itself like some creepy lava lamp of flesh.

Was he high on some kind of drug or something? Where the hell had he woken up, anyway?

He pushed himself up and got to his feet, but he felt so light and hollow that he nearly overbalanced.

Looking around, he saw very dim light reflecting off of placid water. He was standing on the access walkway of a concrete tunnel of some sort, with water to his right, darkness behind him, and faint yellow light ahead. It wasn't daylight, it was artificial. Only one thing to do, then.

He moved forward cautiously. He couldn't see or hear anyone, but every fiber in him felt tense, like he was being watched.

Why was he so on edge? More importantly, why didn't he already know the reason he was here?

He didn't know where he might be, or who he might be afraid of. He didn't even know what this place was. He reached for something to explain this, reached and found…

Nothing.

Despite his instincts screaming at him to move, the cold horror of that realization froze him in his tracks.

He tried to remember anything about himself, anything at all. There had to be some history, some context, some memory that explained this. He focused all his will on a singular question—

Who am I?

Half-formed images danced in his mind's eye like the vanishing details of a dream. Places without meaning, rooms with no features, people with blurred faces. He couldn't remember. He didn't even know why he couldn't remember.

He had a name. For fuck's sake, he had to know his own name!

He tried to recall it, but failed. There were no connections or associations for him to seize on and follow. Everything in his head was unmoored, disconnected from everything else. He couldn't remember his name because he couldn't remember any distinct experiences before waking up here, let alone anyone calling him by it.

A shiver of pure dread raced through his entire body. Some instinctive part of him recoiled so strongly at this feeling of panicked helplessness that he nearly gagged.

No. This couldn't be happening, he couldn't let this happen. It had to be drugs or something, clouding his mind, making him forget. His memories must still be there, since he could sort of feel where they should be, he just couldn't grasp the details. This was no time to panic, that would only make his mental disarray worse.

If only he could focus. It was so hard to think straight with his body practically swimming in strange sensations, particularly that sharp, aching hunger clawing at his insides. He had to push those aside.

He needed to work his way back to some kind of logic. If he could use that to fill in the gaps, then maybe he could make a connection that jogged his memory.

First things first: it was obvious that his mind wasn't completely gone. Looking around, he wasn't confused by anything he saw, unlike stroke victims. He could recognize the concrete and water and so on for what it was, and he was lucid enough to keep track of his train of thought, though his hunger, synesthesia, and general unease were a constant background distraction. He knew that this phenomenon he was experiencing was called 'amnesia,' just like he implicitly knew without prompting that the language he spoke was English. The problem was that he couldn't track that knowledge back to any experiences. It was like the threads connecting the ideas to their sources had all been cut.

For some reason that he couldn't identify, just the term amnesia set off alarm bells of incredulity and skepticism, like it was some sort of contrived pseudoscience. It was beyond frustrating—he was getting these nebulous feelings and associations, but he didn't have the slightest idea where he'd gotten them, or how reliable his feelings were. They just popped into his head, fully comprehensible, but seemingly out of nowhere.

Despite his skepticism, he had a contradictory instinct, a strange certainty that amnesia was actually a real thing—as if experiencing it for himself wasn't enough to prove that. Did that imply it was rare? How did amnesia work, anyway? Was it permanent?

Maybe it was just wishful thinking, but he was pretty sure that amnesia wasn't permanent, or at least it wasn't always permanent. It was impossible to tell, so he really had no choice but to trust his intuition.

Clearly, he was suffering from retrograde amnesia affecting his episodic memory. At least his semantic memory was intact enough to remember things like that worthless bit of trivia, not that being able to put a label on his problem helped him to solve it in any way. He needed to do something.

How would someone go about finding their identity? Just go find the nearest person and ask them for help? Hell no. He might as well draw up a sign saying I am vulnerable, please victimize me. Fuck that.

Then the obvious answer came to him, and he felt stupid for not thinking of it sooner. He brought his full attention to the sensation of a lump resting in his left front pocket. He'd been subconsciously aware of it all along, but in his addled state, he hadn't connected that to his problem.

Feeling around at the weight in his pocket, he felt a thrill of triumph as he withdrew a folded square of leather. A wallet. Of course that should be the first place to look if you couldn't remember who you were. People kept their IDs in their wallets, right? It felt right, at least.

He approached the entrance of the tunnel, sneaking as quietly as he could, though he had no idea why he felt the need to do so. The jaundiced yellow glow of a cobweb-strewn service light on the wall near the entrance allowed him to see better. As he approached, something odd caught his attention. The front of his shirt felt sticky and stiff, and there was still that completely nonsensical feeling of something that sort of tasted coppery resting on his chest and stomach. He looked down, and nearly jumped out of his skin at what he saw.

His black leather jacket and gray hoodie were both left unzipped, and under that was a formerly-white button-up dress shirt. All three layers of clothing were drenched in tacky, half-congealed blood.

He froze for a moment, staring at it in disbelief, then frantically unbuttoned the shirt, checking himself for injury, even though nothing felt amiss. Opening his shirt proved that this was indeed the case. His blood-smeared torso didn't even have a single cut.

More to the point, were those round little holes in his shirt fucking bullet holes? There were more than a dozen of them! Some of the holes in his hoodie perfectly lined up with holes in the shirt underneath, so he couldn't imagine what else they might be.

He hastily zipped up his jacket to hide the bloodstains, which weren't as visible on the black leather. Holy fuck, that must have been someone else's blood. It was way too fresh, and he would have noticed any cuts elsewhere on his body with his bizarrely keen proprioception.

What the hell was going on? What happened? Had he assaulted someone, killed someone? Surely no one was likely to survive losing that much blood. And then what, had he stolen their shirt? What possible reason would anyone have to do that? The only reason he could think of to take the bloodied shirt from a body was so that he could play dead during some sort of mass shooting rampage. The problem with that notion was that it made no sense whatsoever given his surroundings, and even in a more likely location, it would still be far-fetched.

He had been jumpy before, but now he was on the verge of outright panic. He needed to get the hell out of here, find somewhere to regroup, get replacements for the ruined clothes that could only be interpreted as some kind of incriminating evidence, and figure this whole situation out. But first things first: he needed to take stock of his resources.

Returning his attention to his wallet, he opened it up. His driver's license sat in a little laminated pocket on the left, and the picture showed a clean-shaven white man with dark, wavy hair that was neatly combed back. The license read Alexander James Mercer, born July 16, 1979. The signature was a nearly incomprehensible 'Alex Mercer.' To his relief, the name did strike a familiar chord with him, but it was more like the name of a half-remembered childhood friend than his name.

The picture on the license was easy enough to verify—that he was a white man was obvious, and thanks to his synesthesia warping his proprioception into something like a mental image of himself, he could tell without even looking at his reflection that the face in the picture was a perfect match. He had no idea what to make of that skill or delusion or whatever the fuck it was, so he moved on to the rest of the wallet's contents.

Alex's driver's license and given address were both for Manhattan, but that only gave him a vague sense of familiarity as well. He knew Manhattan was a borough of New York City, the world's most famous metropolis, but the card could have said he was from Honolulu for all the detail it provided him. In fact, New York City was probably one of the worst places for an amnesiac to be from, since it was so huge and famous pretty much everyone already knew what it was. He might be in Manhattan right now, for that matter, and not even know it.

Another object of interest was a car insurance card for a 2009 Dodge Challenger, which was a kind of American muscle car if his vague intuition was correct. So he had a car, apparently, but no car keys on him—the only thing he had in his pockets was the wallet. There wasn't even a cell phone or a written list of contacts, which at this point felt like a personal insult, or possibly the result of enemy action.

The rest of the wallet didn't yield much more than that. There was a health insurance card, with much the same information as the driver's license, a grand total of sixty-three dollars counting the emergency twenty hidden behind his license, and a spare condom.

Wonderful. He was completely fucked, but at least he had protection.

There wasn't even a goddamned debit card in his wallet. Who the hell didn't have any debit or credit cards? Was Alex Mercer some kind of ascetic or Luddite? Maybe it was just this fucked-up situation and the blood on his shirt making him paranoid, but he had a sneaking suspicion that there were credit cards in there at one point, but they'd been removed for fear of being tracked.

In a fit of anger, Alex almost chucked the wallet into the river or canal or whatever-the-fuck kind of waterway he was standing next to. He restrained himself, just barely, hissing through his clenched teeth.

He wouldn't find out anything more if he threw away his only lead in this tunnel. For that matter, he still had no idea how he found himself here, and the thought of sticking around any longer set his teeth on edge.

Alex stepped out of the tunnel, and found himself at the base of a heavily graffitied drainage canal, with the distant peaks of medium-sized buildings visible over the sides. Whole geological strata of graffiti and moldering trash adorned the place, including various used needles.

Charming.

He had sixty-three dollars and no credit cards to his name, but even though this place looked completely abandoned, he didn't doubt that he'd soon be jumped by muggers and divested of that meager wealth if he didn't get a move on.

Alex scrambled up the sides of the canal easily enough, but once he was at the top, he was at a loss for what to do next. He was clearly in a decent-sized city of some description, but damned if he knew if it was New York City or not. There wasn't much in the way of identifiable landmarks or anything, and he wasn't quite sure he'd be able to recognize any if there were. At least the street signs were in English. He was on Archer Street, not that the name meant anything to him.

Should he find a police station? No, for some reason, that felt like a really, really bad idea, even if he got rid of the bloody clothes beforehand.

On further introspection, didn't the fact that he was so averse to the idea of going to the authorities say something bad about him? He wasn't some kind of fugitive, was he? The label felt like it fit, just like his name did, but the fuzzy ambiguity of his memory was so vague it was probably less helpful than having no memory at all.

Assuming he really was a fugitive...

What kind of crime was he wanted for? Was his name and face plastered on wanted posters?

There were other options to consider. He could ask someone where the closest public library was. He was pretty sure that there would be one around, even though all he knew about this city was that it was either in the United States or Canada, and he only knew that because the few cars out at this hour drove on the right side of the road, and the traffic signs were in English.

Once he was at the library, he could wait until they opened in the morning and look himself up. He could at least find out what city he was in, and whether he had any outstanding arrest warrants. Or find his family and friends, for that matter. It was more than a little concerning that finding evidence of a criminal past took priority in his mind over finding his hypothetical family and friends, but then again, he had woken up inside a tunnel in the middle of a filthy slum, with no memories and covered in blood, so maybe inferring a criminal record or an estranged family wasn't that big of a stretch.

Going to the hospital was an alternative—it seemed like the thing to do if you were an amnesiac—but then he'd run into the same identification problem as the police station, and besides, he didn't feel like he'd had his skull smashed in with a lead pipe, or however one went about getting amnesia. Physically, he felt fine.

Well, actually, he felt ravenous, dizzily light on his feet, and he was still feeling something like taste through his skin, but aside from all that, he was just fine.

Yeah. Right.

In any case, the library seemed like his best bet. Information was what he needed, and the library was where he'd find it. Actually getting to it was another question. For all he knew, the library might be on the next block over or two whole bus routes away...

Wait a minute. Bus stops, those would have maps, why didn't he think of that before? Sure, he had amnesia, and if his wallet was anything to go by, he drove a car instead of riding the bus, but still—this meant he didn't have to talk to anyone, and possibly reveal that he didn't have a clue what city he was in. Score one for Mr. Alexander James Mercer.

He picked a direction and started walking. In a dark alley long the way, he spotted the dim glow of someone holding a lighter under a spoon.

Fuckin' lovely. Just what kind of shithole did Alex find himself in? He wished he had a weapon or something on him, even just a pocket knife would have been better than nothing.

Feeling jumpy, Alex walked fast and gave a wide berth to the various druggies, thugs, prostitutes, and muttering homeless people as he made his way, feeling much more comfortable hiding in the shadows and avoiding the few working streetlamps. Seeing the light from a fast food restaurant in the distance only reminded Alex that he was so hungry he felt like he'd implode. The only thing stopping him from making a beeline for food was the sheer panic he felt at the thought of his bloodstained clothes being noticed. He had to find some new clothes before the library opened up. Maybe he could steal from a clothesline somewhere.

Of course, that was assuming anyone around here ever washed their clothes. Christ, this place was decrepit. Nearly half of the apartments and businesses looked like they didn't even have electricity, and most of the windows were broken, boarded up, covered with graffiti, or all of the above.

Alex was grateful for the hood he wore, as an added level of distance and anonymity from everyone else. His jittery body wanted nothing more than to punch something or run away at top speed. He felt like his pulse should be hammering in his ears, but oddly, it wasn't. He didn't feel calm, exactly, but nor could he discern his heartbeat, even with his proprioception. He knew exactly where his heart was, but it was shot through with so many numb spots it felt like it had more holes than Swiss cheese, and it wasn't beating.

Alex put the thought out of his mind. He flatly refused to entertain his subconscious notion that he was dead and this was some kind of afterlife, even if this place looked like it could give Hell a run for its money. He was probably just too nervous to detect his heartbeat or something. Either that, or he was much less lucid than he thought.

Drugs. It had to be. Lots and lots of drugs. By God, if this was what a bad trip was like, Alex would never even look at a recreational drug ever again.

Finally, after walking a few blocks, he found a covered bus stop which had once been painted green, but which now sported a patchwork of graffiti. Wherever he was, the locals liked marking their territory, and from the looks of it, the city had simply given up on trying to stay ahead of them.

Alex was a little worried that the bus map would be rendered illegible by the graffiti, but fortunately the heavily scratched plastic cover had escaped the worst of the spray paint.

Looking past the crudely-carved swastikas and marijuana leaves, Alex saw that the city was Brockton Bay, New Hampshire, which was apparently a substantial port city, with the main downtown area in the southwest crescent of a large bay, and major roads leading south to Boston and north to Portland.

What?

Alex had never even heard of Brockton Bay before, and even with the amnesia, that still seemed odd. He didn't know of any major cities on the New England coast north of Boston until you reached Maine, and judging from the map and the huge skyscrapers visible in the distance, this Brockton Bay was a lot bigger than Portland. Then again, he couldn't recall how he knew these things, so maybe Brockton Bay was just a hole in his memory, a place he'd never visited.

He was so done with this fucking amnesia. It had ceased to be terrifying, and now it was just royally pissing him off.

The map was difficult to read in the gloom, but he was able to discern his own position—near Archer's Bridge—and apparently the Brockton Bay Central Library was a good deal south of where he was, more towards the downtown area.

Considering it seemed to be the dead of night, he probably had at least five hours to find some clothes before it opened. All he'd have to do was make his way there and avoid any people until then.

Hopefully he'd find something to eat along the way. Hell, he was more than willing to dumpster-dive at this point, if it meant finding something to eat. Goddamn, he was starving.

A/N: For those of you who are wondering what's going on here, don't worry, no prior knowledge of the Prototype game will be necessary going forward, and the story's point of view will vary by chapter between Alex and Taylor, with the exception of arc interludes. I'd like to give a huge shout-out to Wildbow for his incredible story and characters, and also to Laluzi for writing the excellent Fallout/Prototype fic A Dead World, which inspired this crossover. For those familiar with the games, Alex is starting out here just as he did in the game—recently revived from death, extremely disoriented, and just beginning to realize that something is very, very wrong with him. Lastly, this story is being cross-posted from the SpaceBattles forum as I edit the chapters, so check out Compulsion there if you want to see the story's many informational posts, discussion, memes, musical accompaniment, and wonderful fan art! Thanks for reading!