C'mon Lex, you can do this! Don't let your brain get fried! :O
38 – Angel Power
Instantaneously my brain was overflowed and reeling, the deluge of information threatening to push me out of my own mind. You have to hold on! I reminded myself, trying to find more words to motivate myself with. But I couldn't find them—my own knowledge and memories were slowly leaking out of my head. This was a battle of brainpower, and I was losing out fast.
Keep focused, I told myself, you need to remember who you are. It was scary, but it was true—I was slowly forgetting myself. So focusing whatever energy I had left, I forced myself to mentally recite everything before I lost my details completely: My… my name is Alexandria Ride Hardly. I am… sixteen years old. My parents are Emma and James Hardly… and Maximum Ride… and Fang. I have wings. I can speak so many languages I've lost count… and I can imitate any accent I hear. I can generate electricity… and interface with computers. I speak with both American and British accents… but I can't tell which one is my real one. I'm an icy blaze. Just reciting those simple facts and reminders in my head, forcing myself to be aware, kept me holding on to my last shred of self.
It was measured and difficult at first, but my methods did seem to be working. Slowly and surely I was pushing back, not allowing the network to dictate my thoughts. And, as I kept pushing, I began to extend my mind to more complicated concepts, like facts and memories I had drawn from recent events: Ella Martinez and Iggy/James Griffiths are my aunt and uncle, and they have five children together—Nina, Maria, Wells, Blaze, and Jason. Hunt is Mr. Serious and is also a member of the Griffiths family. Addy is Hunt's sister, and her full name is Adelaide Axlely. Hunt's full name is Fitzhunter Axely, and I learned that the same day he asked me out...
I was finally able to bring myself to a place where I could think clearly without the Brainworks pressing in on my mind, and I skimmed through the data being sent through me. Gross, fashion magazines and gaming websites. I quickly tuned that out and began searching the network, poking and prodding my way around the Citadel's mainframe. Man, it felt good to be the one in charge again.
Finally I came to what I was looking for: staff schedules, schematics, and tank fail-safes. I was relieved to discover that by now all the medical staff had already gone home for the day, leaving only the night watch Collectors to stand guard. On top of that, it seemed Collectors had specially designed brains that could send and receive transmissions directly from the Brainworks, which allowed me to keep tabs on them as they performed their rounds. I 'uploaded' their locations and routes into my mind, which allowed me to almost sense them even when I wasn't connected to the system. I also downloaded several of the building's schematics into my memory, just in case I needed them later.
And as for the fail-safes I had accessed... those came in handy right about now.
No sooner than I'd tampered with my tank's security codes did the emergency open function kick in, detaching the probes from my head and spilling me onto the concrete platform. I put my hands forward to break my fall, and when I hit the floor I rolled to the side. I pulled my mask off and groaned softly—that had not been fun.
But now was not the time for self-pity; I had about thirty seconds before the next Collector came my way, and already I could hear his footsteps echoing from a lower section of the platform. I glanced anxiously at my opened pod and the puddle of green stuff on the floor. There was no hiding this from the guard.
So I did the next best thing: I got out of sight, and I did it fast. Wedging myself between two tanks that sat across from my own, I held my breath watched silently as the Collector approached the empty tank. He stared at it curiously, as if he didn't understand what it meant. And maybe he didn't; he probably thought the Citadel was infallible like everyone else. However, I wasn't about to give him a chance to realize the truth for himself. Before he could contact backup I stretched out my hand and zapped him hard, rendering him unconscious.
I jumped out of my hiding place and moved towards the unconscious Collector, standing over him as he lay motionless in the puddle of suspension fluid. Right then he was about as aware of his surroundings as the interfacing prisoners in the tanks were.
As aware as the interfacers… Suddenly I was struck by a curious Brainworks functioned using human neural signals, right? And since I could control the Brainworks, I wondered... I looked down at my hands, willing a gentle flow of energy to pass between them, like a thread of lightning. Then I lowered my hands, positioning them on either side of the Collector's head so that his temples sat right between them. I allowed the electricity to flow from my fingers to his head, forming a connection. Almost immediately I was drawn into his mind as if I'd been drawn into a tiny version of the Brainworks, instantly able to access all of his information and memories. It felt so strange and foreign looking through his brain's contents: flickers of him crashing a transporter during academy training, the anticipation of his first day at the Citadel, and his curiosity at stumbling upon my empty tank.
And I knew it was wrong—it definitely felt wrong—but I tampered with his mind. More specifically, I tampered his recollection of the last few hours. The only way I can describe it as is that I somehow 'deleted' the memories, so that one moment he would remember lying down in his barrack and the next he'd wake up sprawled on the floor. When I did it, I thought it would help because it might slow him down if he woke up too soon. That, and I was extremely curious. But now... I felt dirty, invading someone's mind like that. I felt insanely powerful. I'm scared I felt a little bit of what Angel felt all the time.
Never again, I decided, backing away from the Collector and running in the other direction. There was no time to stop and ponder my latest mistake; I had people to rescue.
There aren't words to describe how vast and impressive the Citadel's central core was. Looking out between the tanks into the empty expanse in the middle of the chamber, the core seemed endless, descending deep below the surface—at least four fifths of the full complex must have been housed underground, I estimated later—and at the same time stretching so far up that you couldn't see the roof. Both sides of the spiraling corkscrew platform, which stretched from the top of the citadel to the bottom, were lined with steel frames full of connected tanks, and as I walked alongside these frames I didn't find a single empty spot. Each person, each brain contributing its power and processing potential to a central hub of humanity—this was manpower at its most extreme and literal form, I decided.
There must have been thousands upon thousands of people stored in the Citadel, and I wished that I could set them all free from their collective punishment—or at least set all the CSM people free, if that's all I could manage. But I knew that a mass jailbreak wasn't an option; it would be impossible to spontaneously release this many people without anyone noticing. Most of them would just wind up recaptured. So, for tonight at least, I had to stay focused on my objective.
Methodically I made my way through the escalating levels of the Citadel, zapping any pesky Collectors I encountered and interfacing with the Citadel's network as necessary. Person by person I located my targets, toying with their fail-safes and catching them when their tank popped open and they toppled out, instantly bewildered and frightened. Fortunately, the masks they wore kept them from screaming. None of them were seriously mentally disturbed, so after jolting them a little to remedy them of their mild state of shock it wasn't hard to get them onboard with my plan. In total I freed eight CSM people, not counting Ella, who we located last.
As I had done with the other tanks, I shot my beams directly at the electric outlet that connected the tank to the Brainworks. After a few seconds of poking around and flipping virtual switches, I returned to the real world just in time to catch Ella as she flailed through the air in a splash of green liquid. Once she was safely on the ground, I removed the white mask from her face so she could breathe.
Immediately some of the other CSM agents—specifically the three female ones—stepped forward in an attempt to calm her down and console her. But quickly it became abundantly clear Ella wasn't calming down any time soon; her eyes were bugged out and glazed over, and her lips moved nonstop to form nearly inaudible strings of numbers under her breath. Something was wrong.
"Give her some space," I told the others, taking Ella by the shoulders and looking her over closely.
"Eight-oh-two-four-nine-six-eight-four-three-oh-five-nine-two-four..." Ella continued to utter numbers incessantly, and she was shuddering violently. None of the others had experienced shock this severely. I tried zapping her a couple times to bring her back to earth, but it didn't work.
"Her mind is completely overloaded," one of the escapees observed with concern, "It must be PBRS."
"PBRS?" I worried, looking at Ella again, "Even though she's only been in here a few days?" When being briefed on possible issues I might encounter on my infiltration mission, I'd learned that PBRS, or Post-Brainworks Retention Syndrome, was a mental disorder that was common in long-term Citadel prisoners, specifically ones who took on heavy processing loads. But Ella had been in here what, a week or two? If she already had the condition, they must have jammed her with some serious data during her short stay here.
But PBRS or not, I had to do something to try and bring her back. Ella was useless if she didn't have enough wits about her to even walk or to think straight, let alone champion a rebellion. Not to mention her family would be devastated.
Then I thought to myself: Maybe I have to straighten out Ella's thoughts for her. There was a possible solution welling up inside my head, but I was hesitant to use it. After all, hadn't I just sworn never to tamper with someone's mind again? I don't think Ella would appreciate it if she found out I had been poking around inside her brain and re-arranging thought patterns. But on the other hand, she might not appreciate me not re-arranging them either, if I was the only one who could help her. I wasn't happy about it, but under the circumstances I didn't see any other option.
"Sorry Ella," I murmured, charging my hands and bringing them up to her temples. Instantly I was tapped into her jittered stream of conscious, which was overflowing with mind-bending codes and endless trails of numbers. The data presence was overwhelming, pushing and blocking everything else out of Ella's head.
All this info has to go. Carefully and systematically I sorted through her mind's contents, removing stray digits and lines of code, almost as if I was pulling papers out of a filing cabinet and shredding them. I was thinning the flood of information, forcing it to drain away, until eventually numbers and orders were replaced with a jumbled stream of thoughts and emotions. Finally I disconnected, and was relieved to see a confused but self-aware Ella standing in front of me.
"Lex?" Ella asked, looking stunned, "How did you...?" but then she just shook her head, not sure what else to say. Which was good, because if she had asked a question I wouldn't be sure how to answer.
"How long has it been?" she finally asked, "Since I was sent here?"
"A few days," I told her, "but we can't talk now; we need to get going. According to the security schedule, it won't be long before a change in guard comes along and discovered that I've debilitated their entire core night shift." Using the schematics embedded in my brain, I guided Ella and the others out of the core and through the rest of the building, unlocking doors and slipping through hallways unnoticed. All went well, and we made it to the Citadel's outside grounds without a hitch.
Now we just had the perplexed exterior guards to deal with.
"Hey!" a grumpy Collector yowled when he spotted us, "How did you—" before he could react a loud klaxon sounded, and I took advantage of his distraction to give him a good zap between the eyes. That was going to leave a burn mark, I thought with a smirk. Then I turned my attention to the sounding alarms; obviously they'd discovered the unconscious guards, and now they wanted the entire world to hear the alert.
"Run!" I shouted to my fellow escapees, making a break for the front gate. As we approached I stretched my hand out towards the control booth, juicing it with as much power as I could muster. My electricity was greatly absorbed by the booth's metal walls, but some of my reach seeped into the control panel and allowed me just enough leeway to open the gate.
Already a large accumulation of Collectors was trailing close behind us, but we had the clear lead. Still, when I saw our getaway transporter sitting at the end of the block, I wondered if even I, let alone the slower-paced humans, would make it to safety in time. But we gave it our best shot, running as fast as our legs would carry us. When we reached the transporter and climbed into the back, there was maybe ten meters between us and our assailants.
"Drive!" I screamed through the divider, banging it madly. Our driver caught on and put the pedal to the metal, just as a Collector got his hand on the back hatch and twisted the handle. He was left shouting irately in the dust, the open hatch flopping back and forth as we jerked away from the curb and onto the open road. I went to the back of the transporter and shut it, breathing a sigh of relief. That had been close.
I'd actually been expecting a much bigger confrontation with the Collectors than we'd gotten—perhaps another near-death encounter involving firearms and high-speed chases?—but apparently even the high-and-mighty Supremacy had failed to plan for a situation such as this one; the Citadel was supposed to be invincible, after all, and the idea of a car chase taking place never would have occurred to them. So after a few minutes of harried speeding and excessive swerving we were seemingly in the clear, because the driver brought the transporter down to a calmer speed. A few more minutes after that, we came to a complete stop and someone opened the hatch for us.
"Everyone alright?" Fang asked, peering inside.
"Fang!" Ella exclaimed joyfully, "You're alive!"
"Yeah, I guess I am," he replied with a straight face. "Good thing too, or Iggy would have tried driving the truck. That would have ended very badly."
"I heard that!" Iggy called.
As we all unloaded from the back of the transporter, I saw that we had stopped on a road next to an empty stretch of beach. A little ways out from the shore, I could see the Alexandrian Ray floating calmly in the water. Boat sweet boat, I thought to myself.
Just then Iggy walked to the back of the transporter, searching for Ella. "Ella, you here?" he asked.
"You bet I am," Ella replied with a coy smile. She took a step in his direction. "Come here, handsome." Iggy grinned, and then with a flourish he swept his sticky, dusty, wetsuit-clad woman up into a dramatic, passionate kiss. Some of the CSM people awwwed/ewwwed/made suggestive whistling noises. Fang stood to the side and waited quietly for them to finish.
Then Gazzy, who had been sitting in the cab up to that point, walked up to them and groaned, "Iggy, that's even worse that Max and Fang's hello smooch!"
"Shut up," Iggy replied when he broke off the kiss. "You're jealous because you don't have a hot wife like mine." Ella giggled like a giddy schoolgirl, and Gazzy made a grossed-out face. Can't say I blamed him.
"Whatever," he told them, "Can we please just get back on the boat and set sail before someone sees us here? We didn't just pull off the biggest escape in CSM history so you and Ella could get caught in the middle of a make-out session."
XD Oh, Gazzy.
Well, this story's almost done, so I'll be posting the last two chapters either tomorrow or on Thursday. *sob* Man, I can't believe it's almost over already! :'( Especially since I promised myself I'd get offline for the rest of the month to focus on NaNo once this story was up completely...
I just want to take this time to thank my readers and reviewers. *hugs and cookies* I'm thrilled at how many of you took the time to comment on my story—this fic has the most reviews I've ever gotten! Of course, I'd always love to hear from you quiet ones in the back. ;) This story has 235 reviews as of this post; let's see how close to three hundred we can get. :D