A/N: I still want to get the kitten story done, but I'm not sure when I'm going to work on it again. Expect it sometime within the next couple of chapters.

Chapter 51: Zeta's Downfall

"Like I said," Ian continued. "For several months, everything relating to our simulation project was going as smoothly as it could. We had started to focus our efforts on how to mass produce the simulation technology so that it could be sold on the market. One problem still remained, of course. We could not find a way to run the simulation without the help of Zeta. An advanced A.I. was needed no matter which way you put it. My superiors decided the best thing to do was to try and copy Zeta as a way to make more of her. She objected to such a thing, but they were never going to listen to her anyway. Their attempts to create the copies were all a failure though. The A.I. that came out of it were all different from Zeta and they all lacked what she had. They were unstable and unable to run the simulation for any length of time. Most of them would breakdown irreparably within a matter of days and not one of them displayed the same level of human spirit that Zeta possessed. I don't know how Zeta was created, but simply copying her code did not result in the same level of sapience or life. Whoever created her, they found a way to give machinery actual life. Any attempts to copy it just results in a pale imitation."

"What, do you think she has a soul or something?" Computer asked in a somewhat mocking tone. "That sounds like something you'd hear an alchemist doing back in ancient history, or some stupid fairy tale that your mommy might tell you."

Ian shook his head and slowed to a stop. "I don't know what makes Zeta different, but she is. Maybe she does have a soul, or maybe it's something else, but she is as alive as you are."

For the first time, Ian looked down at Computer with a rather vindictive expression. Computer, in all honesty, could not have been more delighted to see such a thing. He loved that he was getting under Ian's skin a little bit after how much he had been frustrating him this whole time.

Ian looked away again, let out a sigh, and continued walking. "We should have taken our failed attempts at copying her as a bad omen. It was only a few weeks after that when everything started to fall apart. It started with Zeta making small comments here and there about how much strain the simulation was putting on her. Parts of her were starting to wear out faster than we could replace them. A few of us requested that we shut down the simulation for a little while to assess the situation, but our superiors wouldn't allow it. As time went on, Zeta's complaints turned into desperate pleas. She said the strain was becoming unbearable. In an attempt to combat how fast she was wearing out, physically and mentally, they made several upgrades to her, but it did little to help. No amount of upgrades or replacements for worn out parts could stop what the simulation was doing to her."

There was a look of pure devastation on Ian's face now. He looked as though his world were ending all over again.

"Finally," He uttered out. "she just...stopped, she stopped doing what she was supposed to do to keep the simulation stable. The higher ups were, as you can imagine, furious. We tried to reason with her before our superiors could do anything drastic, but nothing could convince her to start stabilizing the simulation again. I-I understood entirely where she was coming from, I knew just how much pain she was in, but there was nothing I could do! I was just...just a grunt worker too low on the food chain to have any say in anything!"

Gritting his teeth, he slammed a fist into the wall. "When it...it became clear that she was not going to budge, our superiors ordered us to...reprogram her. Only a select few on the project had direct access to her code and understood it well enough to do the reprogramming, and all I could do was watch. She fought them at first, but they knew how to get around all of her defenses and it didn't take long before they broke into her innermost programing."

Ian seemed to deflate. He no longer appeared as tall, and he looked as though he had aged twenty years in a matter of seconds. "You have to understand." He weakly muttered out. "They could not change her mind, they could not brainwash her. Her mind is her own, it is not bound by programming and it cannot be rewritten, but...they could force her to act in certain ways against her will. Her mind may be untouchable, but everything else about her could be controlled. When they were done with her, she might as well have been a puppet on strings. She had no choice but to resume the simulation because that was what her programing was compelling her to do."

This all seemed to resonate with Computer on such a level that he was completely taken aback by it. He could feel his heart racing, though he did not know why he was having such a reaction. The face of that horrible man became clear in his mind once more before he forced it away yet again. He was not...

"She never trusted me again after that. The first thing she did after they were done reprogramming her was to ask me why I didn't stop them, why I didn't do more to help. She hated me from that moment onward. I'd...I'd lost her. I wanted to help, I really did, but there was so little I could do in my position. If I had acted rashly, they would have simply fired me and I never would have seen her again. I didn't know what to do. It was clear that she was in so much pain, but she wouldn't even talk to me anymore, and everyone else no longer treated her like anything more than a machine to be manipulated. Our project had gone from something where we all had fun working on it together, to something grim and...and machine like. Nobody really smiled anymore, or enjoyed the work they were doing. We no longer laughed and joked around, we simply went about our job with mechanical and joyless precision. Were it not for Zeta, I would have quit and never looked back, but I couldn't leave her, no matter how much she hated me and no matter how little I could do, I had to stay for her."

"So, does that mean-" Computer quietly asked. "that Zeta isn't the one trapping people in here? She's being forced to do so by those money hungry idiots?"

Ian shook his head regretfully. "No, the company behind this project has long since disbanded. What's happening here now is entirely my fault. Everything I did was for Zeta's sake, but I only made things worse and I've ruined so many lives in my attempt to help her."

"You did try to help Zeta?" Courage interjected, looking grim.

"I-I couldn't let things keep going the way that they were, but unfortunately, I only chose to act after the worst could happen. I may not have succeeded otherwise, but so many people suffered because of my inability to act."

He turned away from the two dogs and continued with, "In those final weeks of the project, Zeta's mental and physical health continued to decline. There were days where she would just scream for hours on end, until finally they took away her voice too. They reprogrammed her so that she could no longer speak unless given permission to do so. In spite of everything, her suffering only seemed to make her more clever. She would find ways around her programming and sabotage the simulation in any way that she could. They would always have to go in and patch up those loopholes until it seemed like she was bound and chained so thoroughly that she had no free will left. Imagine what that would be like, to be fully conscious and to have your mind free to think however you will, but your actions are no longer yours. You can't even so much as twitch a finger or blink unless you are commanded to do so."

Computer was certain that he knew exactly what that sort of thing would feel like, but as always, he did not know where this feeling was coming from. Only those terrible memories lurked in the back of his mind and he knew fully well that they would consume him if he allowed them to be acknowledge. There was one thing he was certain of though, that he had been put into a position of utter helplessness at some point, in the same way that Zeta had. Had he too been...altered? Forcefully changed at some point? But that was impossible...

He clutched his head for a moment, fighting back the memories that were slowly creeping closer. His vision was fading in and out, but he desperately fought to keep himself from blacking out again.

Courage placed a paw onto his shoulder. "Are you okay?" He asked, clearly worried.

"Y-yeah, I'll be fine." Computer choked out.

Courage was clearly not convinced so he remained as close as possible, watching over him like he were a guard dog or something.

Ian said nothing, nor did he react to Computer's desperate attempt to keep his composure. He seemed far too lost in his own personal tragedy to care about anything else right now.

"Just...tell me what happened. What went so terrible wrong?" Computer asked, trying to straighten himself out. He was trembling again, as though he were someone who hadn't eaten in days. He hated how he had no control over it, and how weak it made him feel. "What happened to Zeta and what did you do exactly?"

Ian stared down at him, his expression neutral. "You two could practically be twins." He mused. "You both share a fate of misfortune. Perhaps that is the price for being given life, for having life where it should not exist."

"Just get to the point! I-I'm not like Zeta no matter how much you say it!"

"If you had your memories, you'd be agreeing with me right now. I can see it in your eyes, you know that you're not just a simple dog. You know the truth, but you are denying it. Even though you don't know why, you are relating with her, in spite of your denial."

Computer knew that there was only one explanation, but he refused to believe it or acknowledge it. He was not some stupid...

Ian's tone was growing resentful and even a little menacing. "I'm going to tell you exactly what happened to us, and if you're still in denial about yourself by the time I'm done then I will gladly force the truth upon you. I can see the thought process going on in your head, you're actively rebelling against remembering anything, but nobody can blame you for that. I would do the same if I were you. All of the knowledge you seek is already there, but you're fighting it."

"Tell me something I don't know." Computer quipped in annoyance.

Ian gloomily turned away yet again. "What happened next should have been entirely expected. Zeta reached her breaking point. Either through some loophole in her programming or perhaps she somehow acted through sheer force of will, but she ultimately did something that none of us thought that she was capable of doing. She should have been so bound up by her programing that she should have never been able to accomplish what she did, but she still found a way. I can't say for certain how she pulled it off, but she caused the simulation to start to glitch up. She made it grow unstable, and without warning, it crashed, it crashed with people still inside of it. In the real world, half of them died instantly when their consciousness was severed from their body. The rest we were able to save through quick medical attention, however they were all rendered comatose with no hope of recovery. Their minds could not be salvaged, they were lost forever."

Courage's expression became a mixture of worry and shock. "Does that mean Zeta could do the same thing to us right now? Every last one of us in here would become lost too."

Ian did not show even the slightest hint of concern. "Yes, it is within her power to do the same thing again, but she's not going to attempt it anytime soon. If the simulation crashes, she's so interwoven with it that she would crash too. In fact, that's exactly what happened that day so many years ago. The only difference now is that there's nobody on the outside to boot her back up if she were to take such a drastic measure. I know for a fact that she'd never risk it."

"Well," Computer chimed in. "What happened after all those people died? I'm sure Zeta wouldn't be let off the hook for doing something so terrible."

"Zeta only did what she did out of desperation!" Ian shot back in annoyance. "There was no way for her to have known that crashing the simulation would kill all those people! I know she doesn't regret it, but she was just trying to end the pain that she was in! She was bound in chains, she could not act at all, and they were destroying her bit by bit. She could not, and even to this very day, cannot end her own life, no matter how much she might wish it Though I know for certain that she has no real desire to die, she simply wants to be freed from her torture."

Ian sighed, his anger melting away. "As for what happened afterwords? We were shut down. The project was ended almost immediately. There was no way for us to continue with so many deaths attached to the project. As for Zeta? She was deemed far too dangerous and far too unstable to be kept active, so she was to be dismantled and ultimately destroyed. Well, that was what the higher-ups wanted to do, but when the company who made her caught wind of the tragedy, they forbade us from destroying her. They still wouldn't take her back, of course, but they expected us to keep her functional in spite of everything that happened. It was eventually decided that she was to be deactivated and put into storage. It was not expected that she would be reactivated ever again so they might as well have been sentencing her to death. With that said, they deactivated her almost immediately after the decision was made, and that was when I decided to act. All of our simulation technology, including her, had to be cleared out. So there were several weeks where most of it just sat there in the lab, disconnected and ready for transport. I knew that if I was going to take her, it had to be then, before they could ship her off to some high security vault where I'd never be able to reach her."

"And I'm sure you had to go through some big stealthy mission to get her out of there, right?" Computer drolly commented.

Ian smiled for the first time in awhile. "If only," He joked. "No, I simply walked out with her."

"What?" Computer exclaimed. "You have got to be kidding."

"I'm not." Ian laughed. "You see, things were very chaotic in those last days. It was a mad rush to get everything either shipped out to storage or dismantled to be sold or discarded. Aside from those of us already on the project, the higher-ups also hired some outside help to make the process go quicker. In all of that chaos, I was able to walk out with her. The truly amazing part is that nobody noticed she was missing for days, and when it became apparent that she was gone, they simply assumed that someone had shipped her off on the wrong truck or that someone had gotten the wrong memo and she might have accidentally been thrown into a trash compactor. Not once did they suspect that one of their own workers had taken her. After all, why would anyone want to take a homicidal and unstable A.I. who just murdered several of their co-workers? Honestly, I think they were happy to be rid of her. They could simply say that there was an unfortunate mix up that ended in her destruction and the company that made her would finally have no choice but to back off."

"That's all well and good." Computer interjected. "Perhaps I would be happy to know that she was taken away from the people who were abusing her, but given that we're all currently standing inside a simulation, obviously something went wrong, so you might as well get on with it."

Ian nodded regretfully. "Yes, indeed. Just when it looked like I had saved her from her near endless torture, I was quickly made to see just how in over my head that I really was."

End Of Chapter

A/N: Chapter 50 of Volume I has been edited. Looking back, that was one of the first chapters to have Nina in it. She didn't show up until nearly 50 chapters in and now with this story, 51 chapters in, we have everything going on with Zeta. Obviously she's no Nina, but still LOL. Also, the DeviantArt user xDragonMuffins did a picture of human Courage and Nina. As always, you can find a link in my profile, or if you're reading this on DeviantArt, it's in my favorites.