Rebecca cheerily called out, "I made the donuts!" as she entered the cave, bearing a tray with two cups of coffee confectionery in one hand, and an orange and white box in the other. "Hey Shaun, I have this great idea for all the powdered sugar left over in the corners, we can put it all around Desmond's nose and take pics, and then upload them to his facebook. Whoa, why the long face? I got your Bavarian Creme."
Shaun glowered at her from the computer chair. "Rebecca, check the Animus. We're not going to be pranking Desmond anytime soon. Unless we can find him." Sure enough, the chair was empty, the light dark, the screen dead.
"Well, where is he? What happened? You were here, did he get up and run off?"
"I, ah... was taking care of personal business, and the lights flashed, so I ran out of the bathroom." He pointed to the Animus. "It sparked and I could see glitches, but erm... by the time I pulled up my trousers to run over there, it looked like a massive static discharge, and he... vanished."
"Vanished. As in, he was here and then he wasn't here."
"Yes, as implied by the term vanished."
Rebecca began nervously chewing at the cuticle of her thumbnail. "What was he doing?"
Shaun shrugged helplessly. "Sailing. Connor had an argument with his father and then was watching dolphins. I've seen enough Flipper for one lifetime, and he wasn't fighting or anything, and I think we should throw out the rest of the leftover vindaloo from the other day, incidentally. So I thought he could hold out... of course, if you had been here... "
"Oh, don't blame this on me, Mister I've Got This Embarrassing Craving For American Junk Food Please Don't Tell Desmond. I thought you could keep your pants on for twenty minutes."
The Animus rebooted itself. POST, BIOS, OS. Rebecca watched it in silence, until a status message appeared.
HASSHASHIN
"What... "
DEZMND SAFE
"Is the Animus talking to us...?"
NO
EGLE
"Uh..."
ALTR
Rebecca and Shaun frowned at each other. "Either it's got some kind of code that I didn't code, or it's spelling things really badly, which I also didn't code," Rebecca said slowly.
LOK MEMRY
"Who taught you to spell?" Shaun groused as Rebecca began downloading both a memory dump and the video playback immediately prior to the shutdown.
NO ON
"That's obvious."
ANGLSH
NO MINE TUNG
"Who taught you English anyway?"
MINE WYF
"Hey Rebecca, do you think Frau Berliner-Mauer could have gotten in here and married the Animus?"
"What the shit are you babbling about, Shaun?"
"It's telling me that its wife taught it bad English."
Rebecca peered over Shaun's shoulder. "It looks like it learned to spell from like the Canterbury Tales. Or Robin Hood."
!
"Fan of Robin Hood?"
WNTED TO TLK HIM
TAL HIM BE HSSN
Rebecca shook her head. "No idea what you're saying, Baby. Okay, look. Right here..." She played a video clip of Desmond as Connor steering the Aquila. "Pretty boring. But see here, it starts to go hazy. Like he's desynchronizing."
RBN NVR WRIGT BK
"But he didn't do anything to make himself desynchronize. And he's done this memory fine, it was just to help him with the other one."
MYHP RBN CNOT RD
"Or maybe he just couldn't read the way YOU write."
THS RLY DIFFCLT
"Stop, already. Now look, the viewpoint moves away from Connor and goes down the stairs."
RTNHKETON
"Yeah, we can't say his name, but you can't spell, so shut it."
"Shaun, I swear there's no vowel shortage in the Animus. So you see, it goes to Haytham, and it finally gets into focus now."
"Well, he can't be reliving Haytham's memory, that's impossible now."
EGLE
EGLE
egle
"Ugh, seriously Haytham, close your mouth when you sleep."
"Maybe he's got a deviated septum."
"You're just sticking up for him because he's British."
"I am not 'sticking up' for a Templar just because he's British! I'm just saying, maybe he can't help drooling in his sleep."
THMSPSLNR
"I have no idea what you're even trying to say, strange little computer."
"So then it zooms in on the Piece of Eden, then it glitches, and then the Animus crashed."
DEZMND SAFE
"So you say."
SO I KNOWE
"You know, your spelling is really annoying."
SO BE THY FACE
"Did you just... sass me?"
COM ATT ME BRO
"That is so not Canterbury Tales."
NOT DEAFE
"Okay, Shaun, please, stop yelling at the Animus. There was some kind of power surge right then."
EDEN DREW DEZMND BACK
SAFE
RTNHKETON
YUNGE EGLE
SAFE
"He's safe... with Connor?"
"Oh, goody. He's on a wooden ship in the middle of the ocean, with an Assassin and a Templar who need massive amounts of family therapy. Who knows what sort of diseases are going around? You know he's too young to have been vaccinated for smallpox. Plus, this is Desmond, what's he going to do without cellphone reception?"
"Shut up, Shaun. How could he even get to Connor's time?"
PIEC OF EDEN
"And what exactly are you, because I'm pretty sure you're not actually the Animus."
CAV
"...And I'm also pretty sure you're not some kind of geological formation, either."
"No, Rebecca, he didn't mean cave, he meant cavy. As in a guinea pig."
PG?
"You know, squeaky little rodent?"
NO?
"Ah, forget it."
"Why are you calling my Animus 'he' anyway?"
"For one thing, I thought we established that this isn't the Animus talking back to us. And for another, he mentioned his wife."
"So? This is New York, this is 2012, a woman can marry another woman if she wants."
YEA
WMN CN VRAI STRNG
AND TOUGHE
"With spelling like that, we're not talking to a modern woman from New York."
NIL
TRUY
EVTHNG
PRMTE
The lights around the walls strobed.
"That wasn't creepy at all."