Chapter 6: It Go Halle Berry or Hallelujah

"Everybody gon respect the shoot

But the one in front of the gun lives forever."

— 13 —

"DO NOT TOUCH ANYTHING UNLESS IT HAS A STICKY NOTE."

I pulled the note off the door, frowning as I looked it over. I was in a small room just past the elevator, near the topmost floor that it would let me go. The headmaster's secretary, a woman named Smiles who had the unenviable position of being the most average-looking woman I'd ever seen since coming to Remnant, had directed me here. My student ID made the elevator work and got me up this far, at least. Beforehand, most every other possible option in the elevator had been locked off. Though as a final petty fuck you, I sent the elevator to go up to Ozpin's office after I had left.

I opened the door the note had been guarding and suddenly found myself going through a powerful sense of déjà vu.

Racks on top of racks. I couldn't recognize any of the designs, nothing from Cisco or Juniper brands, but I recognized rows of routers. Complete with long trays that looked like servers mounted haphazardly together into rows upon rows. The background roar of a powerful air conditioning unit keeping the room chilled enough to warrant a jacket. The last man out had turned off the lights, leaving only a dim red color from illumination around the floor. It reminded me of Space Mountain over in Disney World for some reason.

I imagined there would have been more light coming in, if it wasn't the evening. Someone had once told me that the CCTS tower here was tall enough that if someone were to watch the sunset at the ground floor, and then take the elevator to the very top, they would get a chance to witness the sunset all over again. While I wasn't quite up at that level, which I was pretty sure was a touristy observer deck in any case, it did feel like that. I could see the very tips of the sun on the horizon, through the massive windows that encircled one wall of the room like the Seattle Space Needle.

My head felt a little foggy this high up. Not counting my time stationed at an Army base nearly a mile high, this was probably the highest I'd ever been in my life. Also not counting drugs.

It felt a little weird to think up here. Almost like I hadn't gotten a chance to air my thoughts in a long time like this. Coco Adel probably had something to do with that

I'll be real with you, sexual harassment wasn't something I was used to dealing with. And no, I don't count that time I went to a gay club looking for free drinks. You can't call it sexual harassment when you were deliberately setting yourself up for it.

Gave me this sensation that I was getting a taste of my own medicine. Weiss had claimed there hadn't been a moment around me when she hadn't felt perved on. And with the vague exception that the sleeve I was wearing, Jaune, did seem to have a physical thing for her, the idea of anything like that with any of my teammates utterly disgusted me. But it did make me wonder just what kind of shit I had said and done during those black spots in my memory. All of the holes between showing up to the initiation, and the old man forcing me to go sober.

I walked forwards, through the little valleys of servers and routers, trying to find the soldiers who were stationed here with me. I've been given the impression that there were two men who worked up here, both soldiers of different armies. I didn't really know why that was. But then again, in my experience being used for the exact same thing, soldiers could often do the highly precise and expensive work worth a six-figure salary for the price of a couple of peanuts. And given that I'm pretty sure the CCTS tower was a government project, either from the local kingdom or from Atlas, it made sense they would want to keep a couple of soldiers on hand to work it. But I wasn't finding anybody with me. The entire floor seemed abandoned, just me, the air conditioner, and the hum of electronics.

Until I finally found a desk with another sticky note.

"Good job. You didn't get lost. Go to the lab and do it. Everyone has to. If you fuck up, you're gone. 3 — LSgt Ozrick."

Lab? What the fuck lab did you want me to do? And what the fuck was an LSgt? From the context it had to be some kind of rank, but none that I was familiar with. Some kind of sergeant was the best I could come up with.

Given the context of the note, I had the distinct impression I was being fucked with. Like someone was trying to haze me. Or, now that I thought about it, I was being set up to fail. I had to imagine two soldiers being told that some seventeen-year-old kid was going to come help do their job would be offended by the idea. If this lab was some kind of test, it was probably something I was designed to fail.

There was a note on the next desk. It listed instructions on how to find the lab, signed by someone named Tsgt Eschweiler. That one, I think I knew the rank. It was an Air Force rank where I was from, E-6 technical or tech sergeant. The equivalent to a staff sergeant in the Army, or for trivia's sake the former name of Army E-7s before we changed the term to Sergeant First Class. The more German name made me think that this was the guy from Atlas. Might explain his more direct, matter of fact nature. And the lack of any emojis in his note.

There was also the fact that, on a technical level, that was a family name of mine. Kind of. Long story short, a couple of my Eschweiler ancestors were probably Nazis. One of them has a page on Wikipedia for helping enable war crimes as a Catholic priest. My grandmother had been a whore. Like, I mean, she spread her legs for anyone with a dick and a couple of bucks to rub together. We are talking hotdog down a hallway level of slutty. Including one time with a Brazilian man with an alarmingly German accent, who accidentally became my grandfather and then completely ghosted her when she got pregnant. This same woman would later go on to marry a Jew, so I guess at least she wasn't racist.

My own proclivities with women had taken after that grandma. But Simone had said she forgave me for everything, which I had to presume included youthful indiscretions. Followed by murder.

She had it coming on both accounts.

I grabbed the second sticky note and followed the instructions through the dark corridors and server racks. Bumping my toes only twice in the dark, and only breaking one shin on a coffee table on the way, until eventually I found the so-called lab. A handful of papers and scattered RJ45 cables littered the little area, a standalone rack not connected to anything else with a couple of routers and what I had to presume were taclanes, aka KGs, little mobile encryption devices I had some familiarity with. You know, that thing they taught us for about two hours back in the schoolhouse, during the night we were told we were going back onto day shift, and were rushed through it all. Because God sure does love us military intelligence systems integrators.

I sat down and looked over the paperwork and instructions, ignoring the passive aggressive sticky notes telling me not to plug anything into the actual systems. The gist of it was that they wanted me to make a working manual server connection between all the systems, through a patch panel, and encrypt it and then decrypt it through the two taclanes.

They obviously expected this to be some high-level shit that some wet behind the ears teenager would utterly fail at.

What they didn't expect was that I was an expert at this exact fucking task. The assholes at my old job had actually made me the guy in charge of doing this kind of thing after I had accidentally been way too fast at doing it. In the Army, if you accidentally prove that you're good or something, they punish you for it. The first step, however, was building a manual network. Deciding on a netmask and—

My scroll buzzed from the table. I had kind of forgotten I'd had it. At my old worksite, you had been utterly forbidden from bringing in outside electronics like this.

Indigo: hey bitch how deyednshun

You: Indie, I literally do not know a single scroll that does not have auto correct. You are literally spelling wrong on purpose.

Indigo: no

Indigo: but really hows it going I think today your staring

I sighed, idly texting her between setting up a /29 CIDR from within the first router to use as a framework for the rest of the network. It would fit the handful of systems I was going through. The console cable and the way to use a laptop to make it all work was about what I would expect, with a couple of Remnant-unique caveats that took a moment to learn. But in a fit of passive aggressive helpfulness, the two soldiers who apparently ran this operation had actually left an instruction manual on the counter. And I knew more than enough to abuse the instructions for all they were worth.

You: At least the Wi-Fi here is great. I'm all alone in the top of a tower, with about a billion Lien worth of equipment. It's a really abstract punishment.

Indigo: video call me

You: What?

Indigo: dumbass u have awsum signal and my fingers hurt from typing call me

I decided to internally name this router Superfly before fishing around on the options of my scroll to figure out how to do a video call.

A moment later and I had the call going. I set up the phone—scroll—I might be in my old workflow zone, but I had to remember that this was not Earth, and I needed to use the right terms. So I set up my scroll on the table, so the camera hopefully pointed at my face.

For my effort, I got a face full of Indigo's boobs. She poked her scroll and it just fell over. Then she appeared to give up trying to mount it, and just held it up, giving me a dopey smile.

"Heya, Jaune," she said happily. "What the fuck kind of detention did they give you? At least back in my day, the teachers would spank you and then you would wonder if it wasn't a sex thing and if that was why you were into some weird shit when you got older."

Coming from anyone else, I kind of would have brushed that off. Given that she was my older sister, and more importantly I intellectually thought she was hot even if my body thought oh fuck hell no, all I could do was shiver.

"I take it all back, Indigo. I can totally tell you why I'm acting weird, and it's all your fault," I said. It took me a moment to probably get my accent right. A vaguely generic Midwestern American accent. If I sounded a little too Southern, it would be weird.

Alabama incest vibes, yo.

She frowned at me. "What are they even making you do? Looks like some nerd shit. I guarantee you that's not my fault that you know nerd shit. Remember that time I was dating that boy, and it turned out he was your bully, and at first I didn't mind that he kept shoving you into his locker, but then I realized that that was awful of me and—"

"Why do most of your stories about me also involve your boyfriend at the time?"

She shrugged, and apparently spun around in whatever chair she was sitting in. "My point is, the day of the locker should have stopped you from being a nerd. I guess I failed you."

I got up to set up the next router. I was going to name this one McTibbins because that word sounded funny to me. On a very annoying note, none of the routers here seemed capable of running fiber optic. And now that I thought about it, I didn't see any fiber optic in this entire building. Just the equivalent of RJ45 or whatever. Picture your standard ethernet cable, the one you plug from your computer into your modem to get direct internet access. That's the kind of cable I'm talking about, more or less. Fiber optic is a little more complex, but a lot more high speed, since it literally uses light itself to transmit information. You can actually test fiber optic cables by putting a laser up onto one end of the cable, and seeing if, after all the spiraling and maneuvering, the laser came out visible on the other side. If it did, that meant the cable was operable.

I legitimately had to wonder if this vaguely future fantasy with hints of cyberpunk world of Remnant was actually a lot less technically advanced than Earth in some regards. I knew their security best practices were shit if some asshole like me could basically hack into the programming using nothing but a bowling alley terminal. On Earth, cyber and network warfare had been on the very cutting edge of technology, and my unit in the Army was uniquely designated as a hybrid signals and intelligence battalion specifically geared towards network warfare. We routinely had active encounters with the Russians, whose mastery of the Adidas tracksuit made them a formidable adversary in the battle for cyber security.

Indigo snapped her fingers, which made a weird sound through my scroll speakers. "Jaune! Little brother. Baby dick!" She whistled. "Back here in the real world, kid."

I shook my head, and just continued working on the router. "As if you knew anything about my dick."

She made a face, arms folded. "Of course I do. Seven sisters and one brother, and not enough hot water for all of us to shower separately. I still have those pictures of you as a baby in the tub. As soon as you get a girlfriend, I'm going to send all of them to her. Got to keep you safe from them girls." She winked.

"This is exactly why I'm not going to name you my kid's godmother."

Indigo gasped, pressing her cheek up against the camera. "Don't you keep my future nieces or nephews away from me! Who else are they going to blame for all of their emotional problems later on in life if not me? You? You couldn't emotionally-traumatize-a-child your way out of a wet paper bag!"

I legitimately had to pause at that and just kind of stare at her. Just kind of blinked, squinted, and felt my soul leave my body. "Well luckily for any potential future descendants, the last woman to grab my ass was about an hour ago and she was gay."

Indigo whistled. "Wow. So all it took for her was one squeeze to realize she'd prefer titty. I mean, every girl's been there. But damn."

I made a so-so gesture. "Honestly, it was more like platonic sexual harassment. I believe she has adopted me as her new little brother."

"That bitch!" Indigo hissed. "Tell me her name so I can slander her all across social media!"

For some reason, the idea of Remnant having social media struck me as both completely ridiculous, and yet entirely in character with millennials and zoomers of all worlds. Apparently three things were inevitable in the course of human civilization: death, taxes, and the invention of Facebook by notorious CIA agent Mark Zuckerberg.

I fixed up wiring my two configured routers together and worked on connecting to a third through a patch panel.

"Coco Adel. But she's taller than you, so be careful."

Indigo looked away, furiously typing at something. Given past experience, I'm sure that that suddenly annoyed look on her face was because she had spelled every single one of her words incorrectly and Google had committed seppuku.

"The fuck kinda name is CFVY. Coffee? That doesn't even make sense," she said. "How the fuck you going to complain about my ability to spell when this is what you have to compare me to?"

"Wait, wait, wait, hold the phone. How do you know that?"

She gave me a look like I was retarded, and turned her scroll towards the screen of a computer. Even in this world, phone cameras didn't play nice with LCD screens. It looked like she was on some website called HuntsHub. And after ascertaining that this was not a Huntsman themed porn site—I had seen those and thoroughly not enjoyed them—I realized that this was some kind of mix between a forum and a Wikipedia or something.

"Gotta admit," Indigo said thoughtfully. "Coco has some really good style. And I am technically still single after kicking my last boyfriend into the pool." She tapped at her chin. "You think if we got married, she would be happy to become your actual older sister? I wouldn't mind having some eye candy like that around."

That was so bad I had to gag, forcing me away from setting up the taclane. "Please don't ever marry my older female bully."

"I'm feeling like you're challenging me. Are you challenging me? You know I can't resist a challenge, Jaune."

Unable to concentrate on actually fixing up the call between this taclane and its brother, I instead navigated to a different tab on my scroll. If I googled or whatever the fuck it was called for Coco Adel, this link was the first for her name. It genuinely did look like a Wikipedia article, or maybe something like one of those fan wikis. Complete with a little sidebar displaying her photograph and a bit of trivia including her height, hair color, and the name of her weapon—the barely pronounceable Gianduja. Apparently she was a graduate of Pharos Academy, a native to Vale, the official leader of her team, and was naturally right-handed. The actual article didn't have too much to say about her story. More like an elongated version of a Pokedex entry. Some of which I wondered how exactly the writer knew, before I noticed that the last edit had been made by an account named Cocoa_Better, and realized it must have been Coco herself.

"I wouldn't want you to marry someone who makes cringy edits to her own Wikipedia article," I said with renewed disgust.

"Wiki what?"

I shook my head, and went back to connecting the two taclanes. "This website. HuntsHub. It seems like an ego project for people."

She gave me a mild look. "So you mean you're not the person who does your own article?"

"I have an article?"

Indigo shrugged. "I think they have a bot or something that automatically makes entries for the new freshman year teams, because I refuse to believe someone that nerdy exists to do it themselves. People edit them as they go. I think the biggest one this year is some girl named Pyrrha. Seems she was a big deal over in Mistral. Your page mostly just says you're the leader of team BASS."

"Who the hell cares about what I'm up to?"

She spun around once more in her chair, before leaning back. She was wearing some kind of tight night outfit that made her boobs uncomfortably visible. I didn't like it. "You're all basically celebrities. The future generation of heroes with mysterious powers out there to save the world. You know, before you get yourself killed. Dad's got a really big page, too. It's actually how I learned how to pronounce Crocea Mors, the family sword you stole from the fireplace."

I glanced at my left arm, where I still had my shield mounted in its retracted form. "I wrote my name in it, so now it's my shield by law. Plus I licked it."

Going back to my computer terminal, I found that I was able to successfully SSH from the first router all the way through the other systems, through both taclanes—traveling across red and then black side networks—and log in to the router at the very end without needing to manually connect my computer to it. But pinging didn't work. I was convinced that that didn't actually make any sense, but that technology was basically voodoo and this was par for the course in my daily operations. I guess I just had to set up IP forwarders for that. Pretty much just telling it that if it wanted to find a certain router in the network, based on its ID, to go through one of its ports in that direction. And if it had no idea what to find, what direction to send all traffic by default.

I had once tried explaining it to a sailor coworker when I was in charge of doing the lab in my workshop. "Say you're trying to find Paul, but the only person you know is Peter. An IP Forward with a default route says that if you don't know who to ask in order to find Paul, you ask Peter. Thankfully, Peter knows, because his IP forwarders point directly to Paul. So by sending your question to Peter, trying to find Paul, you get sent on your way to the right person."

"You might as well just piss on your sword to claim it then," Indigo said. "Either way, Dad's going to kick your ass next time if he ever sees you again."

"If."

She frowned deeply, looking uncomfortable. Indigo folded one of her legs and bounced her foot idly. "Don't say that. You're coming back home one day. I mean, think of the Holiday. Where are you going to go during the semester break?"

"If I go back home, what's going to be there for me except people who wouldn't recognize me?" I shook my head. "I don't even know any of they names no more, for all intents and purposes."

Indigo went quiet for a moment. "Saffron says she's going to be there for the Holiday. A lot of our sisters are. You might be an idiot who somehow learned technology and is growing that weird pube beard, but you're still Jaune. Still our little baby brother." The smile she tried was an uncomfortable expression. "Would be kind of wrong if our little baby brother Jaune never came home."

I stared at my screen as the final ping went through. The entire laboratory network was working, all on a neat little network, all talking to itself manually. Focusing on the completion made it easier not to think about Indigo.

"Jaune's dead," I said softly. Able to say it at my screen, and not to her face. "I killed him. Now all you've got is the asshole in front of you wearing his skin."

Part of it felt good to admit. To just say out loud what had happened. Even though I know she wouldn't believe me. Even though I had directly couched it in terms of a metaphor. Hiding the painful truth, admitting it to her like this, in plain sight.

Jesus but was I a piece of shit to one of the only people in this world who cared about me. Because Indigo didn't really care about me. She cared about Jaune, and I appeared to be Jaune. She would probably want to kill me if she knew the real truth, if she actually believed me when I told her it.

Hell, I wanted to kill me too. But I had gotten over those urges during my first couple of days here. Around the time I survived the attempt, and earned the temporary name bowel blaster.

Indigo sighed. "Ouch. I think I cut myself on that edge of yours." But even she couldn't bring herself to make that remark sound snappy and sarcastic. It just sounded like she was going through the motions. Aggressively pretending everything was all right when everyone knew better.

I looked at the clock. Jesus Christ it had gotten late. No way my detention was supposed to last this long. More to the point, what the hell was Indigo still doing awake at this hour?

I had to ask. "Shouldn't a girl like you be at partying on a Friday night like this?"

She made a puffy face at me. "What'd be the point? Am I supposed to just get drunk and have some stupid fun time thinking you're out here suffering without me to make it worse?"

I snorted, laughing. "You're the worst little sister I ever had."

"I'm going to saw off your legs just to make us eye level!" she threatened suddenly.

I looked at my scroll, right into her eyes, and smiled. I allowed myself to glow with my Aura, lighting up the dark surroundings of the server room. Turning it on still felt like using a muscle that shouldn't exist. The closest I could think of was phantom limb syndrome. My Aura was always active on some level. Always a functioning part of myself, but one that, unless I was using it, felt like it wasn't really there. Phantom limb. But when I reached for it, I could feel it. It wasn't warm like I expected. Wasn't like a full body hug or a cowling or whatever.

It was more like the feeling of being aware of a hole in your chest, and that something was filling it up. A keen awareness that you were coming down from an existential drug high, and that only your conscious will was keeping yourself from crashing. That was what using Aura felt like.

"It's going to take more than just harsh words to break my walls down, Indie."

And that feeling of the crash came in full when you let it go. It was why it was so hard to let go. I couldn't do it, not fully, not unless I was distracted proper. I let it burn at the fringes of my consciousness, little more than a vague frisson in the corners of my perception.

Indigo hissed inwardly and swore. "Of course you would get a force field, you stupid invincible asshole. Just for that, I'm going to find new and creative ways to emotionally abuse you."

I smiled, not letting the Aura leave me. If I looked really hard, I could almost see a vague reflection in the screen of my scroll. So faint it was almost like willing myself to see spots in my vision. But it felt comfortable. Like riding a nicotine high, no actual effect, but comforting knowing you've got it in you. And detrimentally noticeable for its absence.

Only for my smile to fade as someone behind me said, "Wait, what the fuck? Why the hell are you still here at this hour? Holy shit, if you broke something, we're going to fucking kill you!"

I turned around, and saw the two soldiers. Wearing different outfits entirely. The one speaking was labeled Ozrick, Royal Army. The other one, wearing an entirely different uniform labeled Eschweiler, Atlas Army, was just standing there holding a bucket of fried chicken.

"Talk to you later, little sis," I said, and let the call last just long enough for her to yell in protest before I killed the connection.

I pounded the enter key on my computer, sending the ping all the way through the network. "The lab works. I can remote in from one router all the way past the taclanes into the last one. You two can both go fuck yourselves. I'll be here tomorrow to show you dipshits how to actually do your fucking job."

I grabbed the last drumstick from Tech Sergeant Eschweiler's bucket of fried chicken on my way out. Motherfucker didn't deserve the delicious dark meat.