Preparing to go under cover

Memories come flooding back to you in a rush. Walking down a long narrow hall lit by flicking fluorescent lights. Feeling almost naked without your badge and uniform as you head to your final briefing.

Undercover work, despite your best efforts to maintain the outward appearance of cool professionalism inside you were fizzing with excitement. Today was the day. After six weeks of intensive training, briefings, psychological assessments, and target familiarisation today was the day they were going to send you in.

Of course, infiltrating the Burnetti mob would be dangerous but so was regular police work the difference was if you pulled this off it would make your name. A fast track to promotion guaranteed.

You remember being surprised to find your captain there. He was a busy man he didn’t usually bother himself with a lowly rookie like you. With him was an older man wearing a white lab coat and thick-rimmed glasses. The captain introduced the old man as Professor Hans Neudman.

"Professor Neudman here has been doing some fascinating new work," the captain explains "It's still highly experimental but if it works correctly I believe it will radically improve the chances of your operation succeeding."

Well, you couldn't say no to a pitch like that. You agreed without bothering to ask too many questions. Not that you understood much of the answers to the questions you did ask. Some nonsense about neural mirroring and quantum states. In the end you all agreed it would be best if they just showed you.

Next thing you knew they were strapping you into a weird contraption, something like a cross between a dentist's chair and an explosion in a hardware store, and then...

And then nothing, darkness, the void, then here.

"Oh shit," you breathed finally recognizing Professor Neudman "It was you! You did this to me. Um, what exactly did you do anyway?"