...You all have been betrayed.
5x53
53. Standing on the Overlord's Grave
"Mr. Borg has been working on an interactive module of gaming in which the player is transported into the game using highly sensitive technology." Pixal carried herself over the floor, her hands behind her back and a cheery smile on her face, the most stereotypical tour guide persona that Kai had ever seen—but in Zane's eyes, she could've been running the catwalk for a Miss Ninjago pageant. His eyes followed her every move worse than a second skin. Jay kept elbowing Kai in the ribs and crapping out more jokes about it in five minutes than the times Kai had to change his daughter's diaper per day.
It couldn't be denied, however. Underneath his nervous chattering and pointing at things, Jay was having a total fanboy meltdown of epic proportions that was more appropriate as the subject of narrative humor than Zane's puppy love. All the questions he was asking Pixal about Cyrus's planned and performed dream inventions were filled with terminology that the others weren't familiar with.
Kai's opinion was that you didn't need an interactive video game that would stick you inside of the screen. Going outside and playing actual games that you could dictate better than a programmed storyline of chimerical events would prove to be more valuable and constructive.
His words would be unheard anyway, spoken or unspoken. Everyone else thought this was the shit of the day.
Carrying on with the tour, Kai breathed in his surroundings. He was trapped on a floor Jeez-knows-how-high up in the air, and fenced by walls that had screens covering most of the light panels. Machinery that had nondescript roles and shapes corroded the arteries of this massive industrial citadel. He couldn't find it in his heart to complain about being generously offered to take a guided expedition of Ninjago's most popular tourist attraction, but something was off when Cyrus buzzed up Pixal to give them a look around after telling the ninja he would be hard at work scribbling out blueprints for their upper hand in the undetailed Great Battle. Preparations for the future are always neat, don't get Kai wrong. Cyrus's sudden hasty desire to work on the blueprints at that very second without being interrupted, however, turned the liberal feat into a hint of deception.
Cyrus had acted a little funny after Seamus took off with Yuki. He'd had to tell Avery, politely, to go wait elsewhere (she almost had to be taken out by guards, until she finally caved and cowered out of the room, wishfully with her tail between her legs) so she wouldn't be making their company soggy. Most of the questions the ninja asked were either dodged or half-answered, and he couldn't seem to give a straightforward reason to how Seamus got to the Tomb where Dr. Julien hid all of his robots after the Reckoning, a place buried deep out in the woods with very few witnesses online to tell where the location was.
The guy was just acting a little strange. Kai, being Kai, wanted to know why. The worst part now was, though, that even if Cole was having his doubts too, he was acting like it wasn't important, barely a scratch on the surface of their mission—whatever the hell it was. "Tiny things like this have screwed us over in the past," he'd hissed to Cole, low enough so no one would hear them at the beginning of their Borg Industries tour. "Wouldn't it be wise to go over and make sure we've Flex-Sealed all of the small problems before we move on to the bigger ones?"
"Cyrus is a nice guy, Kai," Cole had argued lowly. "It's not him I'm worried about. Whatever's got him on edge, it's not something that he's done."
"How can you be so sure?"
"I can just tell, okay? I've got a feeling it's something he didn't stick his hand in, but is too afraid to tell us about. Or possibly, we're being suspicious dicks and overthinking this, and it's about something that doesn't even concern us, like his insurance policy with the talking lizard." Cole had turned away, signaling the end of their private discussion. But Kai wouldn't let it rest. He treated this the way he'd treated Lord Garmadon when he'd had to become their roommate after Lloyd got himself captured by the Serpentine. (That may not be the best example of how his suspicions saved the day, because they didn't really, if not technically.) 'Proceed with caution' was all he could say now.
Kai tapped his fingers over his lips. Looking around at all of the amazing things that Cyrus himself had come up with, blah blahs of Pixal's vocal limns chorusing his ears, he had to stop and pause in the middle of the beeping machinery to look around. Something struck him. "Isn't this built on the place where the Overlord was defeated?" He blurted, stopping the tour group in action. Several sets of assorted eye hues turned on him.
"This is the same street." Kai was surprised when Lloyd answered him, but he still wouldn't allow eye contact. Baby steps, I guess.
"Good observation, Kai." Zane nodded. "It did not occur to me that this might be the place of the Overlord's defeat."
"It was probably the only available place to build," Jay said once Pixal started guiding them along again, pulling Kai up to sync with the group's pace. "There's a waiting list a mile long just to get an apartment here."
"Oh, I remember." They'd had bad experiences with that lesson.
"Only family makes a home sweet home," Cole said from around Kai's shoulder, thinking of the same thing that they all probably were: their dinky apartment in Ninjago City had been the only place available after they lost custody with all of their living spaces beforehand. Luckily, it turned into a place only for sleeping when they'd found Dareth's dojo to train little Lloyd Garmadon in, so the space wouldn't be hogged or destroyed by a tiny tot trying to live up to his giant destiny. "No matter the size of the space, as long as you have your family, you're—"
"You're being a wet cheeseball, Cole." Jay said. "Quit with the poetic aphorisms. You've been playing too many dramatic roles at the Martha Oppenheimer."
"Marty Oppenheimer," Zane corrected.
"Crap." Cole slapped a hand to his forehead, making the only sound in the room that wasn't beeping, whirring, typing, or Pixal's voice. "School! I'm supposed to go to practice this afternoon for a play that I'm supposed to be in—"
"Just tell them you're sick," said Kai, shrugging it off. No big deal in telling people you were sick. He used to do that at school all the time.
"It doesn't work that way!" Cole self-destructively lamented his asininity. "Without me, the scenes can't be rehearsed!"
Jay scoffed. "Wow, cocky much? I know you're usually being the star of the show, but the world doesn't really revolve around you—"
"Jay, I'm not being cocky," Cole moaned. "I need this part. It pays my bills."
"Cole, what the heck do you think I'd be doing right now?" Kai's morning, on workdays, was usually pretty early for a blacksmith—there was a lot of preparing and setup he did before the shop officially opened for business. He'd be up organizing something haplessly in the shop while his wife and baby laid upstairs in his bed, enviously warm and asleep.
On both the good and the bad side, people could expect Four Weapons to be closed for a while due to the spectacle Anya's brother made last night, ending in injury on Kai's part that the media no doubt was itching to cover. It gave him an excuse to have his doors shut for at least a little while, but time can't necessarily be infinitely purchased by profane events…
"Or me?" Jay added. "I have a business to run, tough guy. That pays my bills. You're lucky I cancelled all of my appointments today, or you wouldn't be seeing me at all."
"I think it is easier to say we all have responsibilities we must tend to." Zane's eyes were on Pixal's every move. Kai wondered if she even noticed that none of them were listening to her balderdash, droning on endlessly and gesturing to things like she was programmed to overlook interims. "It is not just you that has to walk away from the norm, Cole."
"Yeah, but…"
"'Yeah, but,' nothing." Jay waved his hand, banishing the excuse he cut off. "Your argument is invalid."
Cole seemed to take this, nodding in defeat, although his eyes didn't say he'd surrendered to the three-to-one odds just yet.
The tour carried on at a protracting pace. Their ensemble completed four floors of the exhibition in a little over an hour and a half by the time they reached the factory assembly line behind a glassed window pane, giving them a full panorama of the working conveyor belt spitting out parts faster than Jay drilled out jokes. The fifth floor was designated effusively to building things behind glass walls, and just standing there you would witness one of Cyrus's imaginings in the making. Most of the work was done by robotic pincers that drifted from the ceiling, connected to thick metal arms wrapped in wires and tubing to keep it employed. The dark gray conveyor belt moved at a consistent, speedy pace. It was surprising that nothing fell off the belt and onto the floor underneath.
"This," said Pixal, "is the factory line. Here, parts for hovercars are produced, and are assembled in a different area." Walking forward to come face to face with the glass, she turned around, her arms hanging at her sides. "This is where all of Mr. Borg's inventions come alive."
Jay was already glued to the glass, palms flat against the smudgeable surface, thump. The only thing that wasn't touching it was his nose, but Kai was expecting him to get sucked in any second, eyeballs bulging for a chance to see anything he could possibly get his peepers on. "Any second now, and Jay might pass out into a coma," Cole grumbled to Kai as he walked past him, but immediately after saying it, regret pinched his face. He reached out a hand toward Kai's arm. "I didn't mean—"
"No, it's fine." Nya's in a coma, Kai thought, and I didn't even get to see her. His sister's endless sleep almost felt egged on by his terrible siblinghood, a broken unwritten oath of relations becoming the ink for the statuses scribbled on her condition roster, hanging untouched at the end of her bed. He'd missed her most, the one person who had filled the room when it was just them running Four Weapons post paternal death. Returning to the quiet hadn't been the peaceful embassy he'd imagined when he was a complacent teenager believing his younger sister's nose poked unpermissively into his business, inside and outside the ninja world. Kai would do anything to protect his little sister from harm—but what a job he'd been doing for the past five years.
I always thought that because she was with Jay, she'd be safe, he thought, weaving his arms over his chest, almost self-consciously. I know he'd move Heaven, Hell, and Earth just to protect her, and I know that's still true. I knew that with Jay, she was in good care. But I took advantage of that. I left her with him to somehow replace me, hoping that she wouldn't notice I was gone because I was busy cowering in fear in the corner, covering my ears in hopes to block out the whispers of my nightmares. What I mistook was how Nya feels about me, and how important I am to her, and how important it was that I would be there for every moment of her life that followed. I'm her brother, and brothers watch out for their little sisters and stick to their sides in the thickest and thinnest of times. And I failed her.
Cole was speaking to him. He didn't know this was happening because, as much as Kai prepared for it and tried to avoid something like this, Cole was standing on his left side making no impact on Kai whatsoever. He felt the hand hovering in the air between his shoulder and Cole's finally prod him in the bicep, jerking the fire ninja out of his reverie hastily. He whirled on Cole. "Whoa, there," Cole huffed as he drew his hand back to his side. "Are you okay?"
"I didn't hear you." I say that so much every day that the very sentence tastes like bile on my tongue. The only one who doesn't hear that lie is Anya, because she knows the truth…
"How can you not? I was standing right next to you." Kai's spectacle had attained the interest of Zane, Jay, and Lloyd, and each of them, though scattered through the available space of the observance deck, turned their heads towards the dark haired Spinjitzu master with cumulative suspicion.
I can't even see you when you're standing there and my head isn't facing you, Kai wanted to say. I didn't even know you were still there. The words were thick on his lips, notifying him that this was probably what Botox users felt when they got injections in that area, but not even a whisper of what he actually wanted to say would escape his lips. Now didn't seem like the right time to drop that load.
Kai quickly consulted his mental list of fake excuses and tossed out the first applicable one he found. "I was lost in thought."
To his relief, this seemed to fend off Cole's stare, the one that seems to peek into your soul and pluck out every secret you try to hide from everyone else. It was too easy for Cole to slip inside your mind and lick your bones clean of your perplexities just using his eyes. It had always been that way; Sensei always said that Zane was he who carried the Sixth Sense, but Cole had a frighteningly accurate intuition that sent eerie chills slithering up your spine.
A wide hand clapped on Kai's shoulder once more, and Cole turned away. Kai breathed a sigh of relief. That was too close. He stood up a little straighter, angling his body to be able to hear and see everyone. I need to be more careful. The last thing he needed was to run into another moment like that.
Seamus whistled softly under his breath, a haggard tune climbing through his chapped lips. His white lab coat was drawn close to his body, shoulders small and frail underneath the old shoulder line that he used to fill out nicely as a young man—but those days were over, very much over, and now he was living a new reality in which he was the man winning.
It had been too easy, luring this tenacious cyborg having second thoughts into the testing chamber, having him stand in the small, square compartment while behind the glass, Seamus drawled nonsense hubbub over the intercom to try and ease the man's nerves. He was a sore sight for replenished eyes, this one was; old, and in hopeless need of an upgrade. He'd seen some ugly droids in his lifetime, ranging mostly from those he recovered from Dr. Julien's Clockwork Tomb, and this one certainly didn't break the mold, although he was strange to look at.
But even while he'd claimed to be scanning the cyborg and running tests manned by electromagnetic rays, there had been less truth happening to the keys he'd been punching on his console, just out of the cyborg's line of vision. On a screen he scoured the scan Pixal had taken of the cyborg's body, determining which parts were robot at what precise line and which was still human; to his surprise, there was a chamber within the man's chest cavity where the heart should've been that held a mysterious tale he didn't quite understand, but was eager to peek into. And then, he'd pressed a particular button on his keyboard that released anything but an electromagnetic ray competent of dissecting the cyborg without physically doing so.
Seamus was surprised that the oneirogenic anaesthetic, or the sleeping gas, had actually worked. The cyborg was out like a light in seconds, and he pounced on the comatose body happily. It was a necessary deception to use old trickery on those ninja and this old cyborg, as long as he got what he wanted in the end: the secret that Dr. Julien had let live within this thing, his greatest mistake in all his years of inventing.
With the help of a couple of Clockworks he had waiting around, the dishonest Seamus Borg was able to put the cyborg on a table with manacles to hold it down (in case it woke up) while he took his scalpel, and pulled open Dr. Julien's creation at the seams.
The cyborg was in dire need of an upgrade. All of its machinery was days away from giving out, and the majority of it was damaged or ruined beyond repair. Seamus went to work installing every single renovation essential to the survival of the cyborg using his own two hands and the magic of a few of Cyrus's arm-hand machines, careful of the human part of the creature that still existed. It was the strangest thing he'd ever seen. The blood that ran through its veins was actually a chemical compound as an oil constituent, pumped out by its "heart," which served just as a human heart would, with a minor change about it.
He didn't understand why this individual looked so young, when it was clearly so old, clearly immortal (until his machines gave out) yet aging every day.
The hair had stopped producing pigment from lack of nutrient intake, turning it into the silvery white follicles now, and amazingly still grew, despite the reasons it stopped producing pigment. The creature didn't have a full digestive system, but its reproductive organs seemed to be intact, and could function, for what little he'd investigated. So you could procreate. How interesting, Julien; how did you manage to keep this a thing? Seamus thought as he adjusted his classes, hands covered with gloves as he kept digging further through the body of the cyborg, heavily weighed down by the anesthesia he kept it under.
Seamus Borg had updated several of Dr. Julien's robots so much already that he was beginning to take it as a second nature, hands working on autopilot as he worked to refurbish the archaic crap inside of the cyborg, torn half-open in front of him. Raiding the Tomb after receiving a tip from a Clockwork still online, he'd found treasures awaiting him in gilded coffins, a platter of food in front of a man who'd starved for most of his life. Julien had taken his secrets to the grave with him, or so he'd thought—the biggest of his triumphs was here, now, under Seamus's fingers, and he could finally say to the rivalry brewing between the two men for decades, "I've won."
And now, he not only possessed several of Julien's old Clockworks, but this. He salivated within his cheeks, adoring every time his fingers scraped the metal enigmas inside of the cyborg while he worked, reminded of his prize every time. A little mendacity can go a long way, he thought.
An hour had gone by. Seamus's fingers were hurting, despite the pills he'd taken not too long ago; he stepped aside for a while to let the machines add the last of the touches to his new 'friend.' He looked at the gas mask pressed over the sleeping immortal man's face and couldn't help but wrinkle his nose. "I think you need more than just a software update," he mumbled to himself, and whispered a quick command to a Clockwork sitting aside for further direction, watching it dart off in search of his request.
When it returned, he told it to shear off two and a half feet of the cyborg's long hair with the scissors he'd asked it to get. Another Clockwork retrieved a pair of jeans and a decent, modern shirt for the man to replace its tacky wear. All sailed smoothly according to his plan, an eternal smile stabbing his cheeks with pain.
But just being able to dissect the cyborg, that would never be enough. To have something desired by all android inventors sitting in front of him was not what he could just be content with.
They took out its eyes and replaced them with new ones; they accessed the live processor network instilled in half its brain through a chamber in its chest and arm, and found out how to visionary that network by connecting it to a computer. Seamus searched through the memory device on the cyborg's "brain," and deleted what he could of the memory, although he didn't know how much—or what of—he could delete when there was no way to access the part of the brain that stores information and 'memories.'
Seamus rebooted what was left of the systems inside of the cyborg with a platform that Cyrus had modified a year ago. Using the computer, he then installed a software he'd been programming for months in preparation for this very moment, growing more and more excited with every digital pixel that notified him the downloading was concluding.
Software download complete. Seamus's nails dug into the sleeves of his dirtied lab coat, staring at the red, blocky letters on the computer screen. "Yes," he whispered. He could hardly believe he'd succeeded. He hardly even noticed that he was no longer acting like himself.
The virus had been planted.
"And now, the cyborg is mine, as will be all I can create afterward." He stood up, walking over to the shackled prisoner trussed to the operating table. All of the skin had been reattached, scars running over his body where Seamus had divided him with the scalpel's sharp, precise blade. It hardly looks the way it did when it came in here. So different in appearance now. Seamus stood over the cyborg, hands crossed over the head of his cane tightly. His voice rose to a command, "Cyborg Module 001, power on."
Its eyes flew open.
