Disclaimer: I don't own Maximum Ride, but I love to mess with the characters.
She sat in the room with white walls and no doors or windows, fiddling with a string of gaudy plastic beads. She knew both of them weren't real. She wasn't going to get worked up over the fact either. For once in her life, she honestly didn't really care. Chewing her nails until they were non-existent wasn't going to change the fact that white coats had managed to kidnap her, putting her in a virtual reality where they seemed determined to bore her to death with complete lack of stimulus.
"Oi!" she yelled, apparently at nobody, but she knew that they were paying attention. "If you have decided to numb my brain by giving me nothing to do but play with a coloured necklace, I congratulate you. You have officially achieved your goal. But I suggest if you want to keep me sedated for the rest of my life then it's best just to make me unconscious, because you are losing a very special mind!"
For effect, she tossed the beads across the room with enough force to break them into tiny pieces. Then, with nothing to do, she lay down and proceeded to go to sleep. Does it count as sleeping if you're not awake? She wondered idly, trying to relax her mind. It didn't seem to want to. But purely out of defiance, she kept her eyes closed and lay still, deepening her breaths and slowing her heartbeat so that she might appear to be sleeping.
Minutes passed.
Hours passed.
Days passed.
Heck, maybe even weeks passed.
Was there a change?
Nope.
Well, everyone's stubbornness had its limits. Even she did, though she was far from giving in. But a raging desire to do something rather than just lie there still wasn't what caused her to open her eyes. It was the sound of somebody inside her own reality.
"Who are you?"
The intruder was obviously a white coat, perhaps one that they'd created with their computers, perhaps one who they'd hooked to the system to interact with her. Did it really matter?
"I'm Peter, and I'm going to be keeping you company."
Oh great, she thought dryly, seeing through the nice talk to the intent. They've sent me a therapist.
"Really? That's nice, but you guys have a good track record of that."
He didn't flinch at the undisguised hostility in her tone. Rather, he tried a different approach, one that was blunter.
"We're curious, Maximum."
"Don't call me Maximum, my name is Max. Actually, call me Maximum. You don't deserve to call me anything else."
The white coat paused, and then leant against the wall. She snorted.
"If you're going to hang out in my mind, at least give me the freedom to change the surroundings. And don't give me bullshit about how this is in the real world, because you and I know that I'm not fooled."
He remained impassive before, without warning, he complied. "Very well."
She glared so coldly that icicles should have started forming around the two. Then, tentatively, she began to reshape the room. She made it outdoors, in a park, with what seemed like hundreds of colourful kites floating on the wind in the sky. A small wind pushed some of her hair around, while a La-Z-Boy spontaneously appeared for her to curl up on. Without her consent a small smile and sigh escaped her, but were gone in an instant. Of all the things she had missed in the white room, it wasn't colour, but the sky that she had missed the most. Brown eyes zeroed on the white coat, who was now sitting on the grass.
"What do you want?"
"I told you that we are curious. We want to know more about what goes on in that head of yours."
"Can't you just pluck anything you need out of my mind? You know, you may have not noticed, but you've got me hooked on a computer and are invading my brain."
"We don't direct your thoughts, Maximum. You are the one in the driver's seat. We can only see what you submit to the reality we put you in."
She glowered. "And why should I tell you anything?"
He wormed around the question by telling her things that might distract her. There was no answer to her question that she would believe. "You know, we can compress years into seconds, or make seconds take years when we manipulate the subject of your thoughts. You think you've been here for weeks, but you've been here for many months. How does that make you feel?"
"A bit relieved really. If I found out that I'd been lying down for a few seconds after all that work I'd flip."
And so the white coat worked his way to loosening her defences. It took weeks spent in the virtual world, and talking to her and spending time in the different environments she conjured. Houses, schools, hospitals, libraries, concerts, pizza parlours, the sky, the sea, the highest mountains, the deepest valleys, above and underground, even the desert – there were many places she'd taken him.
She was witty and knew exactly how to get under his skin, but with much perseverance, he managed to form a tenuous friendship with her. He told her about the scientists, the virtual program she was in and the lab. She seemed to trust him enough to divulge information about how she felt, what she thought, and this was exactly what the white coats wanted to know.
"You've been here a long time. Nobody has tried to infiltrate the lab's defences so far," he told her. It was only a little fib. Somebody had been testing it over the last couple of weeks, finding weaknesses. No outright attempt to break in had been made, but one was brewing. "Why hasn't your flock tried to bust you out yet? Where do you think they are?"
Concern flickered in her eyes, and even the ghost of hurt. "Oh, they're probably too busy saving the world. It's a big responsibility you know, and you just happened to kidnap the leader of the people on that mission right before shit hit the fan." She played with some of the sand she was sitting in. They were on a beach this time. "It's more important that they do that than come and rescue me."
"You don't think they've abandoned you?"
"Nope. And if they did, it wouldn't matter. I don't care anymore."
"But you cared before?"
Her eyes bored into his. Even though the place they were wasn't real, he couldn't help but feel like she was making holes in his head. "Everybody who I've ever cared about slightly has abandoned me before."
The white coat made an 'oh' face, and she turned away. "It makes you think, doesn't it? You spend your short life not giving up on people, and once they're strong enough, they ditch you. That's how it works. You use people, or you're used. The only person you can ever trust is yourself. Only you. My problem is that I think with my emotions, not my head.
"Jeb was the first. The first cut is deepest. But then there was Angel, right before Iggy, Nudge and Gazzy. Then Fang. Ella, my Mom, even Dylan left once he fell in love with Maya.
"It hurts a lot to be abandoned. It hurts so frigging much. But when you've been hurt so many times, you grow immune. My immunity is in the fact that I couldn't care less anymore. So, maybe the flock has forgotten about me, they aren't going to rescue me at all. But I've been a subject to life's games for longer than I care to remember, and if there's one thing I learnt from it, it's that if you attach yourself to anything, it'll break you."
He was shocked at how much she revealed. She looked nonchalant as she sipped on a coconut and took in the scenery of her own making.
It was the most she had spoken to him, and it was the most that she spoke in the time until he removed himself from the program.
When he informed her she nodded blank-faced. "I still don't trust you, but it's been nice talking to you Peter, even if you are a white coat."
"I'll be back, you know. Just not for a while."
She gazed off into the distance of the cliff by the sea she had them on, eyes vacant. A wistful smile touched her lips. "No, you won't," she stated, and the knowing conviction in her voice made him shiver. "Not in this reality."
He asked what she meant but she didn't answer.
"Before you go, I want to tell you something." He turned back to her and looked to where she was standing on the very edge on the precipice, hair disarray from the sea winds whipping around.
"If you love something, love it so much you feel that you won't be able to live without it, you have to let it go. And if it loves you back, one day, no matter how long it takes, it will come back. And then it's yours."
He nodded. Her words did not click in his mind yet, but they would later.
"One other thing. Remember to only trust yourself. Because if you do not use, you are being used."
With that she leaped, and though he knew that she wouldn't die from the fall, he still felt alarm resonate in his skull.
…} {…} {…} {…
Later that night, alarms went off all around the complex of the lab as the security was breached. The attackers were a group of twelve, strategically attacking the weak points and breaking in. It was extremely organised – the system was one of the best in the world, yet it was like the intruders knew exactly what to expect when they came in. The scientists couldn't determine their source.
The only thing that could be certified at the moment was that they were all DNA experiments – no ordinary human was that fast, that strong, that good at manipulating people, or had wings sprouting from their backs as seven of said attackers seemed to have. They infiltrated the building too quickly, too easily.
At 11.46pm the most prized subject of the whole edifice, the one and only Maximum Ride, was disconnected from the virtual reality system that she had been plugged into for almost seven months. None of the techies were sure how it was done as there was a specific process to go through to do it and nobody could possibly do it in less than three hours. Furthermore, it was done correctly. If there had been one mistake in the process, the subject's mind would have collapsed and she would have been rendered useless for the rest of her life, which would have been short.
One hour after entering the complex the twelve trespassers exited it, taking with them important files on genetic mutation and grafting and the subject Maximum Ride. Millions, possibly billions of dollars' worth of equipment had been damaged and many captives and experiments had escaped.
Every member of the staff in the building were at loss as to how an intrusion so clean, so precise had taken out their state of the art security system. The people on the team looking after Maximum Ride felt that they were missing something, but dismissed it.
Only Peter Smith, whose past few months of work spent inside the mind of a subject had left it too ingrained to meddle with in a small amount of time, had any idea as to what had happened.
He, unlike his work mates submitting far-fetched ideas, said nothing at all.
If you're wondering, the intruders are the two flocks: Angel, Gazzy, Nudge, Iggy, Fang, Maya, Dylan, Ratchet, Star, Kate, Holden and Ella, who by that time had wings. It takes place more than a year after the end of Angel, after all.
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