Chapter 11.

I turned on the phone and immediately checked the wifi networks. Sure enough, there was only one, it was called Shangri-La. There was no password on it, it was a public network. When I connected, the signal strength was… full bars?! How? There’s no way.

Unable to believe my eyes, I opened up the web and did a speed test. I nearly had an immediate heart attack when I saw the number that popped up. 100 TB/s was the number displayed on the screen, the worst part was that it wasn’t even going up or down. It was stuck with that number as the cap.

Impossible. This was absolutely impossible. My eyes shrunk and my entire body trembled. This was speed in the realm of sheer insanity. I nearly dropped the phone from how disgusted I was. It had to be a lie. This was nonsense. Madness.

Who the hell was Adele’s father? Wasn’t he just a doctor? How could he have technology on this level when he died years ago? Based upon the knowledge I had, this sort of speed was absolutely not possible when he allegedly died. Unless he was truly a monster that had advanced knowledge, long before it had ever been made available to the modern world, it should be impossible. 

But this was evidence that could back the possibility that what I knew about him wasn’t necessarily unfounded. What about myself then? What about my exes? Who… or what are we really? Adele’s sister… what I’ve seen, could everything really be true?

How the hell could I have ever known that carelessly connecting to a simple wifi network would make me doubt my own existence and everything I knew?

If I knew how shaken up I’d be form it, I’d have never done that stupid speed test. It was a mistake.

When I looked up from my phone at the island in front of me, everything before me turned into countless streams of binary code. I turned my head violently left and right taking in the sight. I felt a massive migraine assault my brain.

I raised my hands up over my head and squeezed it tightly, shutting my eyes tightly from the pain.

“Darling! Snap out of it!”

Slap-ap-ap-ap-ap!

A strong force landed on the side of my cheek and my head twisted 90 degrees to the left. A single slap echoed out, ringing in my ears. My eyes opened on their own and I saw a mixture of crystal blue green, the sky and the ocean.

The strange binary code I’d seen before was nowhere to be found. The migraine vanished like it never existed and everything returned to normal.

What just happened to me?

“Darling, are you okay?”

I slowly turned back to Adele and saw her face full of concern.

“Sorry. I don’t know what came over me just now, but I seem to be fine now.”

“Darling, we're here for you to relax. Please at least try to get some proper rest.”

Relax? If you wanted me to relax, we could have gone literally just about anywhere else.

Of course… at this time… I was still completely ignorant of the storm that was brewing in the outside world.

If I knew what was to come in the future, perhaps I’d have thought differently at this time.

Yeah right. Like hell that's true. Who am I even trying to fool right now with this shitty rip off internal exposition? I’m just trying to make myself feel better over the fact that I’m stuck in the middle of nowhere with this crazy ex of mine.

In a world, where everything is not as it seems…

Yeah, I should probably stop with this before I get too carried away.

Haaaaaah. Really, just what am I doing? I’m just trying to distract myself from the more troubling problems at hand. I was just trying to escape from reality even if only for a brief period of time.

Right now, it was the only way to keep myself sane.

“Adele, thanks for the slap. I needed it. I got a bit freaked out just now and started to panic over something that really didn’t matter.”

Yeah, who or what I was really didn’t matter much right now. This situation didn’t allow me any leeway to concern myself over such trivial matters. When in an environment where your survival was already uncertain, you didn’t have time to take it easy and have an existential crisis. 

This island was definitely hiding something. That much I knew, but I couldn’t care less what it was. I just wanted to live a normal bland everyday life without these psychotic women around me all the time. I won’t ask that I can always have such peace, since I’d come to accept that escaping them was practically impossible, but a bit of peace to myself every now and then should at least be doable. 

Right now finding the lab with fuel, or creating it from scratch and leaving, either of those two scenarios were my objectives for the time being.

As for investigating the lab and this island, someone who had a death wish could go and do something suicidal like that. Curiosity killed the cat, thus I chose to be the level headed rational skeptic who proceeded with due caution.

I took a deep breath in, then breathed out slowly. The chaotic thought in my head ceased, and my field of view cleared up. The island was in front of me just like before, but I didn’t feel as intimidated when I accepted this was my present reality.

“By the way Adele, how are we supposed to charge our phones when the battery dies?”

“A bit of elbow grease and solar power should do the trick.”

“What?”

She took out a small black box from the same place she pulled out the phone she tossed me earlier.

Of course… there was a hand crank lever attached to it.

“You can’t be serious right now.”

“I’m dead serious.”

“But this island surely has electricity if it has wifI across the entire island.”

“Well, until we find it, we’re just going to have to settle for this.”

Well, at least it doubled as a power bank. You could charge the battery inside it first and charge your phone at any time. It had small low power led indicators on it indicating the battery charge when you pressed the button.