[Temporary hideout of walker #28300, Paris, France, 30 of August 2024, 22:13 (local time)]
The dark apartment was a bit messy. There were books, handwriting notes, journals and random tools laying around. Only a lamp on the desk was brightening a little space. There was an old player on the desk too, filling the quiet atmosphere of the place with a beautiful melody. The ones familiar with Alan Walker’s works would recognize the song – “On My Way”.
The person sitting at the desk was a young woman, a very hard-working archeologist judging by the condition of her workspace. Of course, it was walker #28300, Lily Cadieux – a very recognizable face in the circles of archeologists since her groundbreaking discoveries throughout the last decade.
But now she had to hide and continue her researches alone, keeping most of it secret, especially away from the Red Nexus authorities.
Now, after apparently leaving the Red Nexus, Lily’s current research focused on decrypting the prophecy disks left by the ancient walkers. Even though the original disks were still owned by the Red Nexus, she had the copies of them on her laptop. Lily was using a lot of history sources, looking into every detail, searching up the meaning of every small symbol.
The predictions weren’t promising anything good though… So far by decrypting the ancient symbols she could understand that these disks had predicted few crucial events of human history and one was even still to come. A solar storm of great power was about to hit the Earth. But when? The prophecies weren’t clear in terms of years. The only thing that was clear was the task for the future survivors – to rebuild the World of Walker, a lost Atlantis where all walkers could live in peace and harmony.
“The Elder will unite and guide all to rebuild the World of Walker. With the help of AVI-8s, everyone will be able to construct, but only the Elder will know how the Spectre works.” She was murmuring the possible translation of the prophecies to herself.
Suddenly her laptop, currently displaying one of the disks, glitched, leaving the screen with noises. Then it started working again with an incoming call from walker #0. She picked up immediately. Alan, walker #0, was not only her friend, but one of the few who were helping her in this secret mission.
The first few moments of the video call were spent in silence, waiting for the connection to get better.
“Where are you now?” Lily whispered. “I need some help.”
“I’m still in Bergen, Norway.” The glitchy voice answered through the screen. The quality of the video was bad. “I am waiting for the Walkermobile, some walkers have taken it for a top secret mission. When it’s back again, I’ll join others. I called because I got some news.”
“What happened?”
“A few days ago walkers rescued your professor, Zoran Babic, during a secret mission in San Diego, California, USA.”
Lily jumped on her seat.
“What?! Where was he? How?!”
Alan paused for a moment before speaking .
“You were right about the Red Nexus.” This sentence explained everything.
Even Lily herself still doubted whether the company could be capable of such an action – keeping hostages.
“Now he is safe from Red Nexus.” Lily sighed with relief.
“They knew about the drones, and, I’m afraid, now they know more about the AVI-8 technology than what’s good for us.” Alan continued.
“But we can’t let such technologies fall into their hands… Drones weren’t meant for us. We are just the keepers, who should pass it to the future generations. The drones are meant to rebuild the World of Walker after…” She stopped.
“The walkers will start mass drone production if the Red Nexus scientists won’t stop their experiments.”, walker #0 concluded his thoughts. “If they’re going to use them, we should be prepared too.”
“Things can’t be so bad… Now Red Nexus seems much more powerful and dangerous.”
“What about the solar storm? When?”
“I need more time to define the exact date.”
“What about the prophecies? Have you found anything useful so far?”
“Not really. The ancient walkers could predict the future… There is so much evidence of it that left me literally speechless.”
“Wish we could do it too. It would make our work much effective and easier” Alan joked carelessly. For a minute Lily seemed to be overthinking these words.
“Okay, don’t want to disturb you any longer…” Alan already wanted to hang up.
“But it could work.” She whispered to herself.
“What?”
“We could predict too, if we knew how the ancient walkers used to do that.”
“You know it is impossible.” Alan continued skeptically.
“But if we knew!” Lily started searching the history books again.
“But we don’t know.”
“We gotta find someone who knows more than us then.” She explained. Alan couldn’t help himself to laugh a little bit.
“Girl… More than you?! Who is that? I’ll redirect all our forces to find him.”
Lily scattered her notes on the table, found a piece of paper and showed it to Alan. It was an illustration of a mysterious walker in red robe holding an AVI-8 drone and raising it to the sky.
“The Elder.” She whispered.
“Who?…”
“A walker who keeps the tribal knowledge and knows about traditions, how drones work, and maybe, how predictions are made and much more.”
“Lily… I know you believe in what you are saying. But walker tribes don’t exist anymore. We’re not in ancient times. We can’t go finding a walker who might already be gone for centuries.”
“The Elder exists and I’ll find him! The Gatekeepers in Vietnam should know more about it. They already helped once. I’ll ask them again.”
“Okay, okay,” Alan gave up seeing that Lily would stay on her ground anyways. “You won’t be alone, you know. Walkers will try to help you. Just let them know – anywhere, anytime.” He smiled.
“There’s more behind it… We should continue, you know. It’s the only way.” She went on leafing through books.
Alan kept smiling. Knowing that now nothing would stop her and that she was too busy with her thoughts, he slowly hung up. She was onto something big.