Chapter 5

He woke up to fire.

Fire painted brightly on the insides of his eyelids, scorching up dark stained wood pillars carved intricately and then onto cornices like spilt wine. Fingers smearing ashy fingerprints on carefully domed glass work and wooden beams as smoke strangled the air.

There was white hot fire burning in his head and singing bone off the inside of his skull. Or at least that's how it felt. He had finally struggled out of bed, head in flippers and breathing harsh and shallow when Skipper spoke.

"So what did you see?"

Kowalski looked up from under his flippers, eyes heavy and face still pinched in pain. Skipper was sitting at the table, eyes just as heavy and flippers coiled like a snake around the battered tin mug he always used. There was cold resignation spelled out in the slump of his shoulders and the shadows under his eyes. The weak gold tint of a sunrise barely begun in the water cast cold shadows in the base.

Kowalski rubbed his eyes, and stood. "Fire." He murmured. "Lots of fire, burning down… some kind of building."

Skipper nodded slowly, gaze shifting with a sleepy detachment away from his lieutenant. "Were you outside or inside?"

"Inside." He shuffled into a seat and pressed his flippers to his temples. "There was this feeling of… resignation perhaps? Something more regretful than that?" He paused as Skipper reached out and hefted the ray gun Hans had left behind. He'd almost forgotten about it in the chaos of the night before, but still flinched when Skipper lifted it to the roof and fired.

It let out a short comical beeping and a few pulses of green light and Skipper sighed and dropped it back onto the table. "I didn't even notice it was just a toy." He muttered, rubbing his face.

Now that he was looking at it, it was obvious. Flimsy plastic in bright colours bent into a menacing shape to threaten them. He should have seen it sooner. The silence spanned minutes, the soft burbling of the water filling the spaces there should have been words. Kowalski closed his eyes and tried to calm his racing thoughts.

There was a sense of resignation, looking up and seeing the fire spread over the dark wood against the night sky beyond the glass. a resignation to the inevitable, the burning collapse of a roof that was mere minutes away. And he was going to stay where he was and wait for that to happen. Wait for the fall of glass and smoke and wood and fire to crush him and stop…

Stop something.

The question was, what did it mean? Why choose to show him something like that?

"I didn't know he was coming."

Kowalski opened his eyes, but didn't move his head. Skipper didn't seem to notice. Or if he did he didn't care. One flipper idly spun the toy ray gun in a lazy circle using the trigger guard. "I felt like something was wrong - that something would go wrong. That's why I was so… volatile. I knew something was going to happen, but I didn't know how I knew, or why."

"You turned on the security system." Kowalski murmured, rolling his head lazily on his flipper to look his superior in the eye. He was still focused on something else, eyes glassy and distant. A perfect shade of flat mid-blue veiled under a haze of something intangible.

Skipper nodded again, slowly as before. "I did. Wouldn't you?"

"What did he want?"

"No idea."

Kowalski didn't reply. He didn't want to. Not when he wasn't sure where he was standing, and with all of the cracks around him it was only a matter of time before some part of the ground fell in. He didn't want it to be the part he was standing on. The suspicion stowed carefully last night was starting to flash red and a knot was starting to form somewhere low in his torso.

He brushed it aside as Skipper stood, the glassy haze replaced with clarity and focus. "What do you need to get the information you need?"

The shift told him what he needed to know, and he sat up straight, clearing his throat. "An MRI scanner. I could make something similar, albeit rudimentary, but to accurately have data to map I'll need-"

"Thats fine." He interrupted. "Whatever you need Kowalski."

"That's all. I can download the separate files and compress them into a 3D image state for mapping later, but I need the files first." He paused. "If you don't mind-"

Skipper waved a flipper in his direction. "We'll borrow one Kowalski, name a place likely to have one in operation and that is where we will go."

He nodded. "Right, that uh, makes sense."

"Of course it does." He turned sharply on his heel, and for a split second Kowalski could swear he saw the same cold resignation back on his face. He blinked and tried to come up with something comforting to say, but by the time he opened his eyes the expression was gone again. "Pick the building, I'll wake Rico and Private."

Kowalski flinched. "Wait, right now? We're doing this now?"

Skipper shrugged. "No time like the present right?"

The building was the Alec Feldman Research Center, a low lying but sprawled out complex on the outskirts of central New York. The centre was named after the main benefactor and founder, a businessman who died 10 years prior after battling Alzheimer's for years. Because of this the main core of research conducted in the building was that concerning the Alzheimer's disease. That was as far as Kowalski managed to get before Rico had sighed obnoxiously and Skipper had thumped him on the back and none too politely said "Glad someone said it!"

"Delta check."

He tilted his head to left, the hard lines of horizontal light fanning over Skippers silhouette as he crouched with a flipper pressed to his ear, eyes fixed on the lab beyond the grate. The ventilation shafts weren't large by any means, but crouched down with his shoulders brushing the metal above him Kowalski was at least able to stay on his feet.

The small transmission module in his ear fuzzed with static."Delta check!" Private replied, whisper accompanied by distant laughter and the ever present buzz of static.

"Charlie check." Skipper said.

Again the module fuzzed, and distorted gibberish came through, though it sounded positive.

"Alpha and Bravo, Check." Skipper finished, sharing a quiet glance across the vent. "All right team. Let's do this."

The cover came away easy enough, the fan attachment sliding to the right to rest against the wall of the vent as Skipper gripped the top of the opening and swung himself out of the vent. Kowalski quickly followed suit, flipping out onto the cold laminate flooring and darting back to press flat against the wall.

The module fuzzed again, a soft 'clear' coming through albeit heavily distorted by static and ruined vocal cords.

Skipper nodded once and then they were both sliding quickly down the corridor, keeping close to the walls as the doors flashed by. It was the third door after the first right turn off and they found it quickly enough. Skipper skidded to his feet and locked his flippers together just in time to push Kowalski into the air and allow him to jam the security card Rico had swiped off one of the far too relaxed security guards into the lock.

The research lab was one belonging to Dr Ellen James, and with the good doctor currently unconscious in a supply closet the MRI scanner that had been set up in the now modified broom closet adjacent to her office was up for grabs. As Kowalski shut the door carefully behind them Skipper pulled one of the many pieces of paper tacked haphazardly up onto the white walls down and frowned at it.

"What exactly am I looking at here Kowalski?"

He took the offered print out and gave it a brief once over. "A Magnetic resonance image of a feline brain, unsurprising considering Dr. James study." He passed it back and slid over to the computer monitor resting on a panel littered with paper and switches. "Cats are capable of having Alzheimer's disease you know."

Skipper scoffed and slowly started to trace the walls of the room. "So she looks at pictures of cat brains all day?"

The computer was locked, a password box blinking at him and he groaned. "Yes Skipper she looks at pictures of cat brains all day, of course."

Skipper flipped up next to him, flippers folded across his chest as he stared down the screen. "Cut the sass soldier. You said this… MRY thing wasn't just Ellen's?"

"First its MRI, not… whatever you said. And yes, it isn't. A machine this advanced would be required by the grant funding it to be able to be used by any research group with a use for it." The box on the screen continued to blink at him mockingly. "Password, Password… Dr. James is studying the neural pathways of animals during the onset of Alzheimer's... could it be Synapse? Promodal? Neuropsychiatric?" Skipper was shuffling through the paper on the desk, sending leaves of information skittering across the leagues of it already covering the surface. "No, none of those seem right. And what about numerical digits? thats... " He did some quick math, "Over 9 billion possibilities!"

Skipper stood up and shrugged. "Wouldn't worry about it, I just found the password."

"I can't just not - Wait I'm sorry you found the password?"

He passed him an open and scruffy looking red notebook, the lined paged filled out with dates and words and scrawled on the inside cover two words, one that looked suspiciously like the word 'password' on the screen, and the other likely just that. "Log book Kowalski, if anyone in the building can use it they have to know how to get into it first." He thumped him heartily on the back and jumped back down off the desk. "People are predictable."

"A Log book! Why didn't I think of that!" Kowalski said, smacking himself on the forehead.

It took only a minute after getting the password in to get the program for the scanner up and running, with a mechanical voice slowly reading out the commands courtesy of the Hardware menu and Kowalski's clever overloading of the excel program. "It looks like we're ready Skipper."

A quick flick off the big red switch on the control panel and the machine on the other side of the glass panel stuttered to life with a growling bass like sound that sent a faint tremble through the floor.

"I'll go first, providing you know what you're doing." Skipper said as he pushed a box across the floor.

Kowalski rolled his eyes. "It's not that difficult."

Skipper raised an eyebrow in return, climbing onto the box and motioning for the key card as he pulled his earpiece from the side of his head. "Not exactly comforting coming from the guy who couldn't even think to look for a log book."

He glowered back, tossing the key card at Skipper and turning back to the panels. For whatever reason they were labeled in tiny symbols, and Kowalski pulled down on the one to draw the white trough like bay out of the main body of the machine.

Skipper jumped up onto the bay, and raised his flippers at Kowalski though the window. Kowalski wildly shuffled through the paper on the desk, only messier from their interactions with them until the speaker was unearthed again. "Just lie down, head where the brace is and stay still." he took his flipper off the button, then slammed it back down again. "Seriously you have to be really still. No scratching or anything."

Skipper nodded and lay back.

"Not even a twitch Skipper! It's of the utmost importance you do not move!"

He sat bolt upright and the lieutenant down through the window. Kowalski obediently lifted his flippers from the button and smiled nervously. Eyes still narrowed Skipper lay back again and shut his eyes.

"Wait! Skipper!"

Kowalski was really glad the room was mostly soundproof, because the got the feeling all the screaming Skipper wasn't doing wasn't to congratulate him on a good job. Still he waited until Skipper had stopped shaking his fists at the ceiling to press trepidatiously on the button again. "I just wanted to make sure you didn't have any metal on you"

The exhausted glare was answer enough. "Right, ok, let's do this then."

Another nudge of the bay switch and it started to slowly retract into the machine, the open window on the monitor still reading out options in a slow mechanical tone. "Brain activity software. Neural receptors software. Lateral and Longitudinal imaging software."

Kowalski hit the enter key and watched as the screen opened a window of a badly rendered face lined over in red laser crosses. "Change bay position." another nudge of the switch and the screen was overlaid by two separate windows, with an option box underneath each.

It took a few minutes of listening to the droning robotic voice, but Kowalski was able to change the system settings to make the images more lenient towards being digitally mapped out in 3D. Finishing out the number of images taken longitudinally and tapping lightly on the enter key there was another low bassy sound before images slowly started to appear on the split windows.

Kowalski let out a slow breath as the images cycled through, falling into a time-lined order along the bottom of the screen. There had to be something there, but for now it seemed clear and safe enough. He wasn't sure if that was relaxing or stressful.

There was a burst of static in his ear and his attention shifted. "Bravo."

"Delta, just wanting to see how everything is going?"

Kowalski sighed. "the Comms aren't for gossiping Private."

There was a momentary pause. "Yeah, but I've been watching these security guys and all they're doing is eating biscuits and playing cards." As if queued up there was the rough rumble of laughter in the background of static. "Is it all going fine?"

"As smoothly as could be expected." The screen read 50%. "Phase two initiate. Delta to sector J, Charlie to sector D."

In the time it took for Private to slip quietly through the door to the lab Skipper was out of the machine and pressing his ear-piece back on as he stared down the images on the screen as Kowalski downloaded them to a flash drive. "What is this even supposed to be Kowalski? all I'm seeing is some funny looking shapes in a grey thing."

"Funny shapes in a grey thing." he muttered, shaking his head before turning to Private to take his ear-piece and explain the process.

With the systems set up and a better idea of how far to move the bay the scan went much smoother, and with Skipper reminding him of exactly how much metal Rico had in his stomach Kowalski was crashing the computer with several Excel pages and an infinite equation loop much sooner than expected.

It was only when they were halfway home, the scans safe on the flash drive attached to Kowalski's ankle that they remembered they'd left Dr. Ellen James unconscious and tied up in the custodian closet.

The computer they had at base was only a hair over the line of qualifying for that title. It was a computer monitor, hooked up to a rudimentary rig that allowed for it to display data from any one of the other weird machines around the lab and was able to have any of the stripped back switch boards and false keyboards connected as well for input. Kowalski had been building it up for the better part of a year with the parts he had found at the Junkyard, turning it from an outdated bulky monitor to something with an actual use.

At current there were only two things attached via the rig, the flash drive and a square box of buttons labeled in crude scribbled drawings taped over the actual labels. And that hadn't changed for over four hours.

Kowalski's position hadn't changed either, bent over the panel and trying to mesh the longitudinal and lateral images together in an interlocked frame work that could be viewed from any angle. But it was taking much more time than he had thought. The sun had set, and without a lamp in his lab and lacking the motivation to actually turn the lights on Kowalski was left straining his eyes trying to find the right series of codes necessary to pull off what he knew was more than possible. He just had to work out the right way to do it.

Private had come in earlier to try and usher him to bed, but how was he even expected to sleep when he was this close to figuring out the answers to the problems that seemingly had no answer. Science was one thing, but this was something even more personal than that. The puzzle piece that was needed to reveal the picture was ever so irritatingly out of reach. The headaches and the Images that accompanied them had to have a reason behind them, and that reason was as ineffable as the code needed to find it.

A meshed image appeared on the screen, the whole thing off by at least 40 frames and skewed to the left. He sighed and butted his head against the screen, staring so long the blue dissolved into pixels of red, green and blue.

"Please." He muttered, bumping his head against the screen again. "Please just tell me what you want."

"Walski?"

He turned with a start, almost slipping off the concrete block that was being used in the place of a chair. Rico stood half in and half out of the door, head tipped inquiringly. He heaved a sigh and turned back to the monitor, rubbing at the developing kink in his neck. "It is common courtesy to knock you know."

"Yeah yeah." Rico said. "Come in?"

Kowalski waved noncommittally, exiting the useless code and starting to hammer at the buttons decisively again. The door closed with a soft click and Rico waddled up behind him to watch lines of code line up on the blue screen. "I'm close." Kowalski muttered, "I just need to get that one linear pattern to stop the skewing and this whole thing will be blown wide open."

Rico didn't respond, standing behind him and watching the text with bored eyes. He remained quiet though, waiting out the five minutes of button clicking in resolute silence.

Skewed 3 degrees to the left and off by 60 frames left. Kowalski heaved a deep breath and slammed the exit key.

"Walksi?"

Kowalski started down the screen with a grim expression. "Yes?"

There was a moment where the only sound Rico made was the shuffling of his feet over the concrete. Kowalski turned in his seat to look up at him, brows furrowed. "Rico?"

The weapons expert was shifting from foot to foot, staring down at the ground as he rubbed his flippers together. Nervous actions. That was certainly odd for Rico. "Walski… I... " he broke off, looking frustrated. "Secret." He said finally, looking up and meeting Kowalski's eyes.

"Right." Kowalski said finally, stunned by the strange and uncharacteristic behaviour. "And you want to tell me this secret? Why?" The rubbing motion of his flippers caught his attention and his eyes snapped downwards of their own accord.

"Cuz… you'll get…" he squinted, letting out an annoyed huff, rubbing his flippers together faster like he was trying to light a fire with them. "Idea. Idea?" he looked too Kowalski, almost desperately, but the scientist was staring glassily at his flippers. "Walski?"

His head snapped up like it was on a cord, eyes wide and beak split into a massive grin. "The code for shuffling it is off! Left to right, it all works until you try to mesh it because the code is stopping the perpendicular lines forming! Rico you're a genius!" He span on the spot, hammering the exit key until the screen was blank and then filling it with the fresh lines of code.

Rico sighed and shook his head, wandering away from Kowalski as he muttered under his breath and formed line after line of code. Five minutes into Rico's exploration of the Lab he was startled from his idle shaking of a vial filled with pink and orange liquid by a loud cry. Fumbling for a second he caught it a moment before it hit the ground and carefully put it back on the shelf where it belonged. Kowalski was stood on his concrete block of a chair, punching the air as a static top down image of a brain sat on his screen. "Yes! I did it! finally!"

Rico raised an eyebrow, edging ever so slightly closer to the door, just waiting for the inevitable explosion. Sure he'd like to see it, but he'd really rather not get caught in it. Unfortunately he only made it so far before the door was flung inwards, Skipper glaring with eyes still dazed with sleep. "Kowalski, you better have a damn good reason for the theatrics."

Kowalski spun quickly, missing the cinderblock and falling face down on to the concrete, spouting his scientific nonsense so fast all that came out was a delirious gargling. Skipper sighed, pinching the top of his beak and closing his eyes like he was in pain. "Kowalski, Slow down."

The scientist looked up from the floor and nodded sharply. "right, of course, I was just saying that I managed to 3D render the images with-"

"So what did you find?"

Kowalski faltered. "Well… I actually haven't found anything yet-" Skipper's face took an expression that went beyond anger and Kowalski shoved the cinderblock aside and started spinning rapidly around the outsides of the 3D rendered image on his screen. "But I assure you I will find something! Its just a matter of finding the parts that look wrong!"

"Kowalski." Skipper ground out and Kowalski flicked even faster through the image as Private peered over his shoulder. "Do you know how many nights of interrupted sleep-"

"Is that wrong?" Private cut him off, flipper pointed at the screen as he reached up over Kowalski's shoulder.

Kowalski snorted, and brushed Privates flipper aside brusquely. "Private, as much as I appreciate the help I highly doubt you know what is normal and or abnormal for a brain, for example what you naively just pointed out is nothing but... absolutely wrong, it should absolutely not be there at all, what is that?" He leaned in closer to the screen, eyes squinting and beak parted and he glared down the offensive part of the image. It was a line, lighter than the other parts of the image the carved a long thin path through a section of the brain, seemingly stopping and starting from nowhere.

Private puffed his chest out and crossed his flippers. "Told you!"

But Kowalski wasn't even listening by that point, a new command menu open and occupying his focus as Skipper and Rico wandered over to try and see what all the fuss was about.

"Is it a worm?" Private asked.

Skipper made a vaguely horrified expression. "No… I mean… I don't have brain worms do I?" He gripped his head tightly with his flippers. "I can't have brain worms! Not the brain worms!" He shouted.

Kowalski shook his head slowly, like he was trying to do it but was too distracted to actually pay attention to the motion. "It's not brain worms." He muttered. "It's… its inorganic for sure, but I have no way of knowing just how inorganic but if I can isolate it and work with it on a separate opacity setting I should…" He slammed his closed flipper against the monitor. "Come on!"

There was something there, something gnawing away at the edges of his memory, but he didn't have enough time to think about it. Not now when he was this close to something, to an answer! There was a weight in his bones like they had tensed, waiting for the release. Whatever this inorganic substance was it was holding some form of answer, it just had to be. He hadn't even noticed until now that he was shaking.

"There, the opacity on inorganic and organic is staggered and both are isolated so -" He broke off in a jagged exhale, trying to take in what the screen was telling him. The line had only been a small part of a much larger puzzle, a 2D sliver of a 3D sphere.

Private's voice was rich with confusion. "Bubbles?"

Kowalski could see why he thought it was that. From a wide translucent view the inorganic matter, which with its higher opacity, was forming glossy white empty globular shapes at seemingly random intervals throughout a section of the brain. Some were small and others large but they all formed thin membrane bubbles that encased sections of the brain.

"Are they bubbles?" Skipper asked, sounding no more sure than Private did.

"I… I mean." Kowalski went quiet, struggling to pull together some sort of explanation. The gnawing was still there, still insistent. "Whatever it is, it's not harming us seriously first off." He stepped back from the monitor, squeezing his eyes shut. There were patterns he could find here if he just looked, if he just followed what logic and reasoning told him. "So that rules out any sort of poison or neurotoxin. Because they are simply encasing sections and are not empty that means they were put in around the existing matter already there." Something was missing. "Why would anyone do that though? Why do you encase something?"

His eyes were still closed but he heard skipper say, "To isolate it? contain it?"

Kowalski held a flipper up in the vague direction of his leader. "What good would isolating a part of the brain do? The brain functions with charges of electrical energy that turns into action potential when fired between synapses, and you can't block energy!"

Skipper looked like he was about to speak, but before he could even finish drawing the breath to start what he wanted to say Kowalski slammed an open flipper against his forehead, the other carving an angry downward pass through the air in front of him. He cursed and Private shrunk back, cupping his flippers over his ears. He could hear his heart beating in his ears, not enough to drown out the angry heaving of his breathing. "Sweet thermodynamic laws It's the receptors on the postsynaptic end! They've been blocked!"

Private had timidly dared to pull his flippers back from his ear holes. Kowalski was pacing, eyes wild and chest heaving like sucking black ocean waves. "Kowalski?"

"Blocked!" he repeated, rounding fiercely on the much smaller penguin. But the look in his eyes almost suggested he hadn't even known he was there at all. "It's like the basic survival instinct that causes a release of hormones that block the receptors of your nerve cells when you hurt yourself, the pathway for the feeling of pain to your brain where it registers is the same until that point where it stops. Our brains function through the thousands of series of impulses firing and registering but these," He ran at the monitor and pointed again at the bubbles, "block that! Somewhere the path is stopping dead and it is stopping us from accessing whatever information the pathways in these sections of the brain reveal!"

He heaved several quick breaths and made a gesture with his flippers that honestly he wasn't even sure what it was supposed to convey. "So what is missing? What basic functions do we not have access too?"

None of the three Penguins answered. Skipper still had a flipper pressed tentatively against the side of his head. Kowalski could almost feel his mind racing, the jumps of electricity a phantom singing in his skull. What did they not have access too? As far as he could remember they had all been perfectly healthy, without mental or physical incapacities. The niggling feeling abated momentarily and for a moment he could see it. A glimpse of the answer to his questions. But it was gone before he could even realise what he was understanding.

"For as long as I can remember we have all been perfectly healthy." he murmured.

Something there. Something was wrong.

"As long as you can remember we've been healthy?" Kowalski opened his eyes and shifted his focus to Private, but the words he wanted to say were lost when he saw the frown. It looked like the half hearted doodle that constituted his notes. Notes about memories, more specifically how few he had.

'Do you remember your mum?'

It was like a punch to the gut. The feeling of forgetting something important was gone. In its place was the sudden axis tilting jolt of two ideas snapping into place alongside each other. His vision felt almost blurry. "It's the memories."

This time it was Rico, the resident psycho leaning forward as he spoke, face stripped back to a look of concern. "Memories?"

It was Skippers scan. That made three. He lifted his head and met the eyes of his leader. An exact shade of perfect flat mid blue like it had been mixed for ink toner in a computer, no variations, no subtle shifts.

There was something else in there, in that deadened shade. Something he'd missed. Kowalski brushed the thought aside, forcing his focus into remembering to breathe and trying to relax the tension wound so tight under his skin. "What was your Mother's name?"

Skipper's face changed, moving like a kaleidoscope, shifting through expressions before settling on irritated. "What?" He barked. "What does that have to do with anyth-"

"Don't." It was supposed to be a command but it broke halfway through and turned into something closer to a plea. "Don't let it deflect your intentions, what was her name!?"

"I don't understand what this has to do with the current situation Kowalski!" No one had turned the lights on, and the lab was still dark, lit by the harsh lighting of the monitor spilling jagged shadows and sweeps of light that were such a dirty white it seemed they were rotting.

"It has everything to do with this Skipper, I need you to answer me." He had stepped away from the monitor again, and with each wave of his flippers the sickly light would be cut through with wide swathes of darkness.

Skipper lifted his flipper and pressed it against his temple, eyes narrowed in irritation that was starting to burn into anger. "Classified." He spat.

Kowalski couldn't tear his gaze from the flipper however, the feeling of his suspicions being confirmed simultaneously filling his heart with helium and his belly with lead. "You don't know, do you?" there was a tremor present that he couldn't choke down.

"Of course I do," skipper snorted, "what kind of-"

"No. You don't know. Because the earliest memory you can recall is waking up in that crate on the way to this Zoo!" He knew he was guessing, knew he was getting away from the facts he had, but something was telling him that he was right, he had to be right.

Skipper didn't deny it and Kowalski laughed.

It wasn't a nice sound.

"These postsynaptic receptor blockages are blocking our memories. They're the basic brain function we can't access. No only that but they're… they're reflective! They're diverting normal thoughts from their original paths to places that make us instantly dismiss the fact we can't see any further back before we're even able to see that fact." He laughed again. "It's brilliant actually, because the pain stops you from looking deeper, and that pain is triggered by the repeated electrical charges you fire at those blockages when you try to do that! It protects itself from wear, and from being detected consciously."

"What are you trying to say Kowalski?'

He forced his eyes to focus again, the urge to run and yell and scream hammering so fast under his skin. "Whatever those blockages are they were put here to make us forget and make sure we didn't know we had forgotten." Other things were clicking along and falling into place like domino's. Skipper was rubbing his temples again, so was Private, faces pinched in pain as they watched him out of squinted eyes.

"The headaches are the wearing down of those blockers cause by repeated attempts to gain access down those paths during sleep." He swallowed deeply. "That's what the pain is, that's why we have headaches. Because we are trying to access those memories even as we are sleeping."

Private tipped his head inquisitively, a naive gesture so out of place in the sickly coloured lab and air charged with fear and anxiety. "Like… dreams?"

"Exactly like dreams." Kowalski's flippers were flying again, waving animatedly to punctuate his sentences. "Because it is our dreams. You dream only of faces you have seen before and most dreams are based off memory anyway." He stopped mid gesture, the aborted wave hanging heavy in the silence. "That's what those images are. Memories."

The silence lingered. It lingered and permeated the air pushing down on the awful tension leering up and over the entire lab.

"What does it mean then?" Private asked, voice barely registering higher than a whisper.

Kowalski's mouth was dry. "It means," he couldn't think because suddenly those teal eyes were swimming at the front of his head again, warm and heavy with something that made his stomach drop. "It means everything we see before a headache was at one point a real event we experienced."

Someone sucked in a loud, hard breath, but when Kowalski looked at Private he was looking at Skipper who was in turn staring straight ahead like a deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming truck. "Are you sure?"

"Yes of course I –"

Skipper cut him off, eyes snapping over to him. They were still wild. "Because that is a big claim to be making Kowalski and you had better be damn sure you're right."

"What's wrong Skipper? Is it about the forest fire?" Private asked gently, reaching up to place a comforting flipper on his commander's shoulder. Skipper seemed to shake himself out of whatever weird trance he was in and looked down with confusion. "What? Oh right yeah. That."

The momentary pause was a moment too long, but before Kowalski could question it Skipper had turned back to him. "So we've been brain wiped."

"In a sense… yes."

And that was it. The entire room was utterly quiet. Only the faint burbling of the water outside of their habitat being pumped through its system was stopping it from being an absolute deathly silence. Rico was just stunned, face slack and eyes darting back and forth like he was pouring over some wild internal conflict. Skipper and Private were just staring at Kowalski as he stared back, all four of them trying to figure out where this left them.

And it was a good question. What did it mean that he had once seen a building go up in flames from the inside, waiting for the fire to take him too, or that he had seen a pair of wild teal eyes muted by something warm and deeply primal. What did it mean that someone had made them forget those things? Why all their time before the Zoo, why at all?

Kowalski could feel his mind churning over its new axis. Sure his questions had been answered, but more had just arisen to take their place.

"Well at least we know who did this."

All eyes snapped to Private in an instant and he flinched. "What… Isn't it obvious?"

He paused, looking beseechingly at each of them in turn, seemingly hunting down even a shred of understanding.

"It's Blowhole."

Siri? Play 'Whoop there it is.'

And we finally hit pay-dirt on this plot of mine! What's coming next? Well that's my secret now, isn't it? ;) also I hope ya'll LOVE terrible fake science because theres going to be more where this came from. Once again, I'm not a neuroscientist so if you are please forgive me.

Shout out to the Official editor of this project - xxXTryMeXxx. This story would make far less sense without them!

Buckle in friends, next week's chapter is a wild one.

See you all next week~
Peace!