Chasing a Waterfall

The dinning room had a long table with twelve chairs. Two hutches filled with fine china and glass tumblers aligned the wall. A portrait was placed between them. It showed a screen of a man, a warrior really looking down at a village. To his side were what looked to be ninjas? Below was a village that was protected by samurai. He stepped back. Damn this was getting weird, he thought.

To the left of the dining room was a kitchen. It housed a large steel refrigerator. A stove of similar cool blue steel tone and a very long counter in-between. What he did not see was a kitchen sink, though he did get a good look at the many cabinets below and above. Moving his eyes back, it than came into focus. The kitchen sink had been right in front of his eyes all along. It was an isle; a kitchen isle with a sink. A number of pots and pans were hanging down from a fixture holding them overhead.

Shaking his head and rubbing his eyes, he half expected all of this to disappear. The trouble was that it didn't. It was still there the upon reopening of his eyes. Walking over to the cabinets he searched for a glass. Finding a large glass vase, he than searched through the massive refrigerator. Grasping onto a bottle of water, he put the glass back and chased down the two naproxen pills with the bottle of ice cold water. Only than he realized how dry his mouth had been, and proceeded to finish off the bottle of water. He grabbed another, and proceeded to down that one as well.

After disposing of the water bottles in a recycle bin, he made his way back to the bedroom. He closed the door part way. Somehow he knew that he was likely going to find some men's clothes in the closet as he entered the room. He did. Grabbing a t-shirt and boxers, he pulled them off from the clothes hangers and made his way into the bathroom.

He needed a shower. Leaving the overhead light off, he closed the door, flipped on the overhead fan and relied on the light illuminating from a role of wickless, electric candles. They seemed to be motion sensitive. His presence in the bathroom activated them. Placing his clothes on the sink counter, he got a towel from the nearby pantry. He wrapped his clothes in the towel and placed them once more on the counter.

Turning his attention to the shower, he stripped off his remaining clothes, which was little more than a pair of black boxers. Entering, he released and pulled the lever to the shower handle. He was momentarily surprised by the direction and force of the waterfall. It was like a heavy rain and it was coming from above. He soon realized that there were two settings. One that controlled the multiple hanging showerheads and another that released a vent like structure that simulated a true, rapid rain fall. It lever controlled both system of water disbursement.

He began to replay the day so far as rapid rain drops skipped off his back and down onto his face from overhead. A good twenty minutes later, he managed to pry himself from the comforts of the relaxing shower and toweled off. While doing so, he got another fleeting glimpse at himself in the mirror. He really was a good ten years younger than he last remembered. Pulling his clothes on, he was back in the bedroom. Finding a pair of tan Dockers and a green long sleeve shirt, he pulled on the remaining clothes.

What followed was pretty much a daze. He found his wireless phone, wallet and keys. Making sure he had some extra cash in his wallet, and not just plastic. Finding a coat, though more of a ski jacket, he took that as well. Exiting the apartment, he locked up behind him. Taking the elevator downstairs, he walked out into the lobby and with the help of the doorman, who knew him, directed him to a bus stop three blocks down from Michelle's apartment. Though he was a bit mystified as to why he needed directions, and why he was taking the bus. This gave him the sense that he was often a visitor to the apartment.

The walk did him some good. With the subsiding headache, it gave him a chance to clear his nasal passages with the fresh autumn air. It was late autumn. The trees had already changed colors and were now in the process of dropping their leaves. The winds were heavy, but the temperature was only moderately chilly. He would guess at the mid to upper forties. This would be confirmed by his wireless phone. Though he had been greeted with a password, it had been one that he was very familiar with, and had taken only three guesses. Upon confirmation, he was greeted with a screen full of various widgets. One of them was a weather app. It was forty eight out.

Using the GPS to find his present location, he than entered the coordinates to find his old apartment. It was in an adjoining city. Waiting for the bus had been lackluster. The bus ride itself was long and boring, though it gave him a chance to go over his contacts, notes and files. His taste in music was still the same. What were not were his contacts and his job. He knew of none of the names. Not a single one. His job position had changed as well.

He worked for Michelle's father, just like Michelle. He did not know whether they met on the job, but he believed given the information presented before him that it was likely. What he did not know is whether Mr. Howard Chase knew that he was intimate with his daughter. The last thing he needed was to contact anyone that he worked with and acquire into his sudden forgetfulness.

At least he found out what his job title was. He was a special operations liaison to security assessment team. This was not a financial position; it did not deal in security risk with investments. Rather, he was part of corporate military. He was the top advisor to a Mr. Blackstone. More puzzling, he had a military background, though the origins at the moment were a bit of a mystery, though it could be established that he had advanced paramilitary training. It seemed that he had the rank of a major. His age was no longer of mystery. He was not as youthful as his appearance gave off. He was in his early thirties. Still, this was many years younger than he remembered being, and a great deal more physically fit. Further, he did not feel to be even thirty. He felt like a guy who was in his prime in mid to late twenties. He now possessed the compact body of a special operations soldier, and a few scars to show for it. One of the scars was on the underside of his left forearm, and the other, on the lower on the right side of his neck. It looked like they had been treated, but the wounds had been too deep to be completely effective in reducing some scar growth.

Coming to his attention, he realized that his stop was coming up. Pulling the wire, he got off a block before 1277 Greenville Street. He, however, was greeted with a neighborhood that he did not know. Gone was the building that housed his apartment. In its place, a residence of similar stature, but it was not an apartment. It looked to be a dormitory. A girls' only dormitory by the unfriendly stares that he got from a few of the college girls. It seemed that the local university had expanded their campus foothold. His apartment, if it had ever been there, had been one of the causalities.

Walking on, he stopped at a local food co-op. There he got a coffee and sandwich. Taking advantage of the higher speed wireless access than what was provided by the congested native signal of his cellular network provided by ATT, he got online again. With no signal fade, he opened his email client and was greeted with around a hundred messages. Some of them seemed pretty cryptic. The text of Project Eve appeared often throughout, though there were a few nasty, in a good way, messages from Michelle. Some of them were a bit graphic for corporate email, and he even felt guilty scanning them over at a table, at a restaurant in a IGA Food-COOP. Closing down the email client, he again launched a browser window.

He did some searches on the company that he worked for, Whitewater Inc. It was a telecommunication company that specialized in the deployment of stratellites. What he until now believed was only a next generation concept to replace the complexities of satellite communications. In this "through the looking glass" experience he was living, the concept was not only viable, but a very strong commercial venture. Two companies seemed to so far have corned the market. The first being Whitewater, and the second, Gaslight Technologies. A new startup founded by multibillionaire, Marcus Yi Tang, who was a PhD graduate of Oxford. He was a linguist, who had made a killing in a next generation of speech recognition and translation software. He held dozens of patents. This was only his latest pet project. There were others. Most known among them had been his aspiration of a new generation of search engines. This, however, had not panned out. He had than ventured into the stratellite communications market.

Unlike his last venture, Gaslight Tech was successful. It was very successful. He owned nearly forty percent of the emerging stratellite market. Whitewater Communications, Inc. Or simply, Whitewater had the other sixty. As he did more research, he came to a realization. The company he worked for was not Whitewater, but rather Blackfoot Securities, a subsidiary. Of further interest, Whitewater main base of operations was in near Vancouver, British Columbia, while Gaslight Tech was in Manhattan.

Michelle's father was wealthy, but he was by no means a billionaire or even a multi-millionaire, though he did alright for himself. He had a number of investments and holdings. The apartment that his daughter lived at was one of his holdings. It was part of a multi apartment complex in the downtown shopping district called Fordwright Heights. His daughter, Michelle Chase was a bit of a socialite, though she was well educated too. She had an undergraduate and graduate degree in psychology from Chicago University.

It seems this is where her father had first heard of him. He at the time had been a law student at the University of Chicago. Prior to going to law school, he had served two tours of duty in Iraq and Iran War. Apparently, this was a new conflict. He had been assigned his position as an officer after graduating from Fordham University with his undergraduate degree in philosophy and engineering. He enrolled in the Marines and was assigned the rank of 2nd Lieutenant. He had taken the officers commission. Within four years he was a captain. By the end of his tour, he had been promoted to captain. Upon his return home, they had given him a final promotion to the rank of major. He had been party to a dust up in Cuba months after returning home from the Iraq/Iran War. It was just prior to the fall of communism, and a few years after the fall of Raul. Afterward, he had been honorable discharged from the military. At twenty eight, he had six years of service under his belt. Three years later he was a graduate of law from the University of Chicago.

He now put the phone down. He needed to think. The trouble was it was hard to with his cloudy mind. None of this was possible. There were a number of serious issues with his past. It was not possible to become major in the Marines in a little over six years. Why would a graduate of Fordham University? His father had been a pacifist, if not a social anarchist. Why would he enroll in the United States Marine Corps? He was not in shape enough to be part of the Marine Corps. Since when did he know anything about engineering? He had taken a number of classes in logic and philosophy as part of his governmental studies, and had entertained the possibility of law school, but had never scored well enough on the LSAT to get into the University of Chicago.

He spent most of his afternoon at a local Barnes and Nobel. He didn't know where to go. This version of himself was unknown to him. No memories existed of Michelle, Whitewater Inc., his time in the Marine Corp or law school. He was beginning to believe that he was beginning to trip over the edge of mental stability. Though again, he was not sure where to go. Who would he confide this madness in?

He had come to a conclusion that he was facing three possible overlaps in his personality. First, he clearly remembered being Vincent Fairborne. A man who had worked at a state bank and possibly did some moonlighting (or secondary) work for a NGO think tank on issues of emerging capitalism in hostile environments.

The second, Vincent, who he was now referencing as v.2 was a prestigious graduate of both Fordham and the University of Chicago degrees in philosophy, engineering and law. He was an inactive duty major in the United States Marine Corp, who worked for Blackfoot, a subsidiary of Whitewater under a mysterious Mr. Blackstone, a man that he had yet to meet. This second, identity, of which he had no working knowledge of. The information was simply gathered from the notes on his wireless phone. Oddly, enough which contents had been encrypted with a password that even the original Vincent Fairborne could have guessed.

He was in a relationship with Michelle Chase, the daughter of the acting director of Blackfoot Industries. He did not at the moment know what kind of relationship they were in at the moment, but based on messages on his phone it had been debated on whether or not to get engaged. This, however, had been messages from several months ago, and since than the messages on this topic had died down. Still, it was clear that he was in some form of a relationship with her still, though he did not live with her at the moment.

Finally, there was an unknown identity. He remembered bits and pieces of it, but it was nothing like either of his other two identities. All he could remember were vague memories of Washington and a sister and her friends. Oddly, one of the women looked a lot like Michelle.

During his time at Barnes and Nobel, while casing over the phone a second time, he had come to discovery further information. He was renting a townhome. Oddly enough, the townhome was near Greenville Street. It was on Oak Park. A few blocks down from where he believed the first Vincent Fairborne used to live in an apartment with Kate Winthrop. He had planned on stopping by after he stopped at his girlfriend's residence to gather a few additional memory cards that he had left behind, though he would prefer to time it so that he didn't walk in while she was around. In his present condition, he really wasn't in the mood or capacity for conversation. He literally was a man of many minds with confusing overlaps of personality and body persona.

He had begun to suspect some form of disassociated identity disorder. The trouble with this was the diagnosis. It was very controversial. Many psychologist and psychiatrists did not even believe that the disorder existed. Further, though he fit some of the signs, he did not fit others.

He clearly had multiple mannerisms and, or beliefs. A distortion of time was present. It seemed that severe memory loss was present. He had been suffering from headaches as well. However, this is pretty much where the symptoms of diagnosis stopped. Still, it might have been enough. The more he thought about it, the more likely he began to place the symptoms that he had been having within the diagnosis.

There were, at least in his head, two Vincents, and possibly a third, though he believed those memories to be separate from the first too. One was a back office worker, the other a former marine, who was working at a security company. The third seemed to be of a college student.

He put down the phone. Vincent realized that this was getting to him. A walk in the cool autumn air would do him some good. For a time being he did not need to focus on this issue. What he needed to do was call Michelle to find out if she was home yet. If not, he planned on getting his townhouse key and data cards and getting the hell out of there for the time being. Maybe a night in his own residency would restore some of his sanity.

Two blocks out the door from Barnes and Nobel, he placed a call to Michelle. It went to voicemail. He waited by the bus stop. A second call was placed some twenty minutes later. This one went to voicemail as well. Catching the bus, he paid his toll and took a seat far off from other passengers, which was not difficult because the bus was mostly empty. He shared the confines with a few college kids, a woman with two children and a man who looked to be in his late fifties. The man was of white complexion, almost bald. He wore short frame wire glasses that covered his brown eyes. Something about the man sent a chill up Vincent's spine. As best he could, he tried to put it out of his mind for the rest of the bus ride.

The arrival at Fordwright Heights took almost an hour. Getting off the bus, he made his way two blocks over and into the apartment building. A building called Solaire One. The twin building next-door was Solaire Two. The doorman was a bit surprised, but a dry wit and wicked grin crossed his face only a brief moment later. Taking the elevator up to the eighth floor, he got off and made his way down the hall to the end apartment. He could have sworn that he had heard laughter just before placing his key in the door and twisting the door knob, but he wasn't sure. The ways the halls carried acoustic noises, the noise could have been emanating from anyone nearby. For all he knew, it could have been a couple talking down the hall. Taking a quick breath, he inhaled and went inside.

Back at Fordwright Heights...

He had ever so carefully closed the door behind him while he was still in the foyer. The voices of laughter and giggles continued. One of the voices sounded like Michelle; the other being unfamiliar. Amused laughter continued, though he wondered in the back of his mind if what he was hearing was really laughter. The joyous sounds had a hint of euphoria.

Curious to what was transpiring; he pocketed his phone, which he had removed in order to find the apartment key, and moved into the living room. He was greeted by the whirl of fans and an empty room. Though someone had been here recently, an aroma was still present. A screensaver image was displaying a series of smoke signals on the television. The rest of the room was as tidy as ever, though. Quickly scanning over the dinning room and kitchen brought nothing of intrigue to his eyes. A brisk walk to her bedroom rewarded him with nothing, nor was anyone using the bathroom. The door was open part-way and the hue of the candles gave off enough of an ambient glow for him to conclude that no one was in there.

Not bothering to think anymore about it, he opened the closet and searched through his shelf. Within no time at all he had pocketed his apartment keys and the extra data cards. Uncovering a digital camera, it looked to be of Fuji make of the SLR variety. Placing that within the confines of the camera bag, he shouldered the and moved back out into the kitchen.

Now the sounds that he heard were no longer laughter or playfulness. Moaning and whimpering filled the air. Placing the camera bag down on the kitchen isle, he looked in the direction of the sounds. He had not been wrong. Laughter had indeed been coming from the direction of the dinning room. What he had failed to take notice of was that there was a hallway. It was to the side of the second hutch. The short corridor led a small distance and then forked in two directions. Unsure of the situation, he kept quite and crept down the hallway.

On his left, a laundry room, and to his right, further down was another bathroom. This bath was rather simple in contrast to the one in her bedroom with only a single sink upon a wide counter, and a tall cabinet in back of the sink. To the right of the sink was the toilet, and a shower with sliding glass door was over further. It didn't really matter though, the room was empty.