Preparing to go undercover

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 nervous as hell. Despite your misgivings, 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 fear wasn't the source of your apprehension. You don't mind admitting you've fallen into a bit of a rut in recent years this operation will certainly shake you out of that and give your career a boost but you can't help worrying that you might let everyone down.

You remember not being surprised to find your captain there. He was a busy man but the two of you got on pretty well. It felt good to know you had his support. 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 explained "It's still highly experimental but if it works correctly I believe it will radically improve the chances of your operation succeeding."

Obviously, you had a lot of questions about that. Not that you understood that much of the explanation to the questions. 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?"