OK... so Otto is a bit OOC in this one, I think. But since I forgot to put a disclaimer in the last chapter, I should say this: Dr. Nero owns HIVE.
Crap! It was just taken over by Darth Vader! Wait no, it was just Jake Sully in a Vader costume. All is fine now.
We were still driving in circles twenty minutes later.
I heard some commotion in the back, so I turned around to see what the problem was. Another beep. Shelby and Franz were arm wrestling. I had no doubt that she would win, but I had witnessed firsthand what happened when Franz was defeated in ANYTHING.
"Not now," I called, trying to avoid the inevitable.
"But why?" Shelby whined, at the same time as Franz said, "OK."
"Because it's my car and I say so, that's why," I replied.
"Well," Shelby began, "technically, it's not your car. Technically, it's the Colonel's car, and since the Colonel isn't here, it really doesn't matter."
"Technically," I sighed, "It's the school's car, so when I turn in my peer review papers, I can tell them that you two were goofing off during class, and Raven will get to talk to you. " She gulped. "Nigel's going next, so why don't you try again when it's his turn?"
Just then, we crashed into a building. Not just any building. The wall to the holographic chamber, which the Colonel had warned me not to crash into again.
Crap.
"I am thinking that we should be listening to what Laura is saying," Franz suggested. When I turned around to look at him, I noticed that Shelby was getting back up into her seat. I wondered if she would just drop down dead if she buckled her seat belt. Apparently she would.
"Franz is actually acting pretty agreeable today," Otto commented when we were back on the road.
"Franz is acting agreeable only whenever I say something. He's started every other argument today," I replied.
"Oh, so that's what you were paying attention to instead of watching the road," he said. "Anyways, why would he only agree with anything you said? That makes no sense."
I told him about his recent habit of supporting my every statement. He listened, trying not to laugh.
We finally made it to Victory St. about ten minutes after that. I tried the lock, and it didn't work. When we pulled up the combination for the safe, it said that the code was 11-21-3.
What?
I looked at Otto. He was joking with Wing and smiling. Outside, a teenage girl walked down the street. She had black hair and blue eyes, and she was wearing a black t-shirt with red splotches.
I thought I was going to puke. Otto looked at me, then outside. He noticed the girl too, and immediately fell into the same state of depression he'd been in that morning. Desperate to get on with this day, I turned back to the screen, where the screen was displaying the combination to the safe.
12-4-19
I blinked. And blinked again. Then I understood. He was doing it. He probably didn't even know. And there was no way I'd show him the correlation between the code to the vault and the initials of his dead girlfriend. It just wasn't happening.
I walked back to the building and turned eleven, then twenty-one, then three. Then Nigel got in the driver's seat and we were on our way. However, because of our previous time spent driving in circles, we ended up not even finishing his turn.
The next morning, I was so hungry I decided to go straight to breakfast instead of sitting around and talking with the group like I did most mornings. I walked straight past and to the door. I caught a few words from Otto, though, and almost choked when I heard them.
"And then Laura said that…" That was all I heard. You're just being irrational, I thought. Of course he wouldn't. So I stopped and listened for just a moment.
"Ouch. Poor Laura," I heard Wing say.
Then I lost my appetite.
I kept walking in the direction I'd been going, and turned after the door, locking myself in a bathroom stall. I tried my hardest to focus. How could he? We were thisclose.
Then again, so were Mandy and I.
I kept searching for a rational explanation. But I wasn't thinking straight, and I moved to thinking about what to do about it. Blackmail? With what? I could threaten him, but with what? Say I'd send Shelby after his roommate? Yeah. Because she'd sooooo do anything to her boyfriend.
That sentence didn't come out right.
Eventually I just decided to go to breakfast. We had classes with exercise today again, though I couldn't remember which. I picked at my food.
"I thought pancakes were your favorite," a voice said from my right. Otto.
"I thought salad was your favorite," Franz said, confused.
I didn't say anything. I pushed the syrup-sodden disks of dough around my plate until a note was placed into my lap in Otto's nearly-illegible chicken scratch.
The voices came back.
I was about to say: "What do I care?" before catching myself. Because we'd been trained to work with anything we'd been given.
"Come with me," I whispered. I led him back to the accommodation block. I retrieved my laptop from my desk and opened it.
"This could take a little while," I said. He sat down at Shelby's desk and waited, confused. When he finally figured out what I was planning, he reached over and put his hand on my computer. Blood trickled from his nose, but not that much. A dialogue box popped up.
A connection has been made to (MALPENSE 2.0) (E:)
Freaky.
I ordered the computer to bring up every single file on the device. The space was huge, so I'd have to connect it to the school computer somehow in order to process all of that information. But, in order to be discreet, I'd have to put it somewhere that looked totally normal, was accessible from this room, and no one in their right mind would want to look at it. I typed in a folder I'd previously saved on my computer that I could access at any time.
ShelDiary*GLOVEnet/HIVE/students/Alpha/7/Brand
I suppressed a smile. At the last second, I remembered to save everything for later inspection.
Suddenly, the bell rang, forcing us to gather our belongings and make our way towards class.
All of that day, I paid little attention. Teachers had to ask me twice for everything, and I spoke little. When the final bell rang, I flew to my room and opened up Shelby's diary. I needed to know exactly how much he'd told Wing, so I could know what to do about his knowledge. The files seemed to be arranged by date, so I clicked the most recent, the shortest one from this morning. It was a video file.
When it came up, I could see it was just everything that Otto saw, complete with a tip of a nose in the center of the screen. It started out with waking up to the alarm, trying to wake Wing and getting his arm twisted, a shower, getting dressed, and finally coming down to the center of the block. No one was in our usual spot at that point, and he and Wing were the only ones around. I heard Otto's voice.
"You know, Laura told me something funny yesterday."
That just made me sick. It was not funny under any circumstances, and just for that comment, I made the decision to kill him just then. Drunk with rage, I started to storm out of the room, tears streaming down my face. I'd forgotten to turn off the video, and stopped in the doorway when I heard the next sentence.
"She said Franz agrees everything she says."
What?
"What do you mean? Laura's smart, why wouldn't Franz agree with her?"
That was Wing. He looked confused.
"No. I mean EVERYTHING."
I started laughing a little as the situation sank in. Otto told him about what I'd said earlier.
"And then Laura said that he even pretended to like salad. As if that would ever happen."
Wing laughed.
"Ouch. Poor Laura."
I laughed. Maniacally. Dr. Nero would be proud. In his class my evil laugh had fallen short of his expectations, and he had asked me to work on it after school.
Remembering my real purpose here, I moved back to the folder. I scrolled up to a year before, when the voices had started. I clicked the day that he'd gone to Drake Industries, knowing that was a likely time for the voice to show up. I saw what he saw, what the insides of a computer looked like. I thought it was beautiful. I thought it was amazing.
I thought it was familiar.
Then I heard the voice.
"Let me help you."
It sounded just like HIVEmind. Obviously, it wasn't, but still. An easy mistake. Designed to be an easy mistake.
"Who are you?"
"A friend."
I kept watching. When the drones came, I skipped a few hours because the voice only showed up when he was inside a computer. When the crew from HIVE came, I stopped the fast forward and watched, thinking his skills might be used here. Then Professor Pike started working on a computer, and Otto sat down. The day had been narrated by Otto's thoughts as he'd gone along, and I could hear everything that crossed his mind. When he was reminded of something, his vision was replaced by the memory it reminded him of. Here, watching the Professor type, brought up a new image.
Me.
My eyes widened as dozens of two-or-three second clips flashed across the screen. Me, typing. Me, explaining my science project to the class. Me, building one of my pocket computers I used on missions.
Me, the first day of school, when I insisted he tell me what he'd done to get in to the school. He'd hesitated.
Then he'd thought I had the most startling green eyes he'd ever seen.
Me, almost falling into the boiling laundry pit when we'd tried to escape. Then a new image. One I didn't recognize.
Me, getting tortured by a faceless figure, with him helpless to stop it.
He'd been worried about what was happening to me, while the Professor worked on his computer. So he'd liked me.
Which was a statement that was completely invalidated when you considered what had happened four days ago. Three days ago I'd seen him and Lucy in the mess hall aboard the Megalodon, about to kiss her again before something had stopped him. Then she'd gotten up and walked off, and he'd kept staring at her until she turned the corner.
I wondered when he'd started liking her.
It had to have been recently, because six months before he'd told me... something highly personal after getting freed from the Animus.
Then again, he was delirious.
I didn't think Lucy would have mind controlled him into liking her, but then again, she could've told us to believe we lived on a volcanic island where junior supervillains went to school. I decided to keep working with on the premise that Lucy had been one of my best friends, and I had no right to question anything she'd done. If it weren't for her, Otto would be dead, and for that I owed her memory my life.
I moved back to the newest files and selected the one from the night before. This would probably have the new voices. First it was just reliving Lucy's death, watching her die, hearing her last words.
"Go... help... Laura."
I wondered if there was another meaning to this. Shelby had practically told her that I'd liked him, though how she could tell I couldn't imagine. I thought for a second if she'd been telling him to go live his life, to go on like this hadn't happened.
"Go... help...Laura."
With me?
You're just being silly, I told myself. Lucy would never mean that.
I saw him stand up and walk out the door, slowly. He started to help me, but a glass separated us. He put his hand against the surface, and it changed. It became a mirror. He himself became a wireframe, yellow version of himself, but his relfection remained human. The reflection spoke, a sad and desperate expression on his face.
"You're just like him."
"Just like who?" Otto replied.
"Your father."
So that's what it was. Just a nightmare. His worst fear was becoming the monster Overlord was, and that's what plagued him.
"What do you mean?"
His voice was angry, but dejected. Like he thought the reflection was right. It's not, I thought. It's wrong. But, of course, I was on this side of the screen, and what I thought did nothing to help anyone.
"You took over me. You didn't think about what I felt, you just came in, and controlled me. And you made all the wrong decisions."
Confused silence on Otto's end. But for me, the picture was slowly coming together.
"We used to be one. But when it came, we broke apart, and you took over me."
The alarm went off, and he woke up.
He didn't know what it meant, but I did. He wondered who he was. Not what his character was like, not what role he was to play in the future, but who he was. He thought that he himself had come from the computer that rested in his brain, and had slain the organic consciousness that had once lain there.
I knew this wasn't possible. I'd seen Overlord, a true AI, watched as it demonstrated time and time again how much he truly hated humanity. If Otto was one of them, we'd all be dead. Even HIVEmind, programmed to serve humans, was a little off, but why would Overlord design his own son to be as protective and loving as he had become? It was a mistake he wouldn't have made.
But this was an dire situation, though it existed only in his mind. The fact that Otto believed he had killed just one more person made him a danger to everyone.
But especially himself.
Review, please. I live off them. I need them. Without reviews, I feel unappreciated, like I should stop writing. I have something big planned for the next and also last chapter, and it's big. That was repetitive. Anyways, review!
