Washington DC
15:26

Basement - Sub Level-III darkened as it always did when the Spearheads' dome-shaped holosphere went up completely, surrounding the one-metre-radius platform along with whoever was up there, running the complex and advanced programmes of the supercomputer.

Frank watched silently as Aaron walked around Joe's bed, reconnecting the three medical monitors and scanners they had detached earlier to transport him to this level. Joe was silent and looked pale and sickly in his white scrubs as he placidly lay there, blinking slowly at the revolving logo of the Spearhead that bounced around on the 360-degree screen.

After he was satisfied with the monitors, Aaron moved closer to Joe and attached two leads to his temples and two more to his chest, which promptly caused the monitors to come to life with the information they were receiving through the leads. The two scanners near Joe's head monitored his brain activity while the one on the opposite side kept an eye on his heartbeat. The readings from the cuff on his right index finger also showed up on the same monitor, making sure the rest of his body stayed responsive and within acceptable limits while they attempted this never-ever-tried-before method of memory retrieval.

"Is that really necessary?"

Frank couldn't help but ask when Aaron started to tighten the built-in restraints of the bed around Joe's wrists and ankles. He tried his best to tamp down the unease he felt at seeing his brother like this, entirely out of it and effectively helpless. Joe's grief-filled words from earlier were still fresh in Frank's mind, demanding attention. He had been right in any case, Frank admitted. There was a fracture between them, and it had been building slowly without either of them realising it. And, now, what Frank was doing to him, was widening that chasm even more, not healing it. He resolved to properly talk to Joe and do his best to fix things between them after Lexi was safely retrieved.

Joe, for his part, was determinedly focused on the logo on the holoscreen, paying no mind to what the surgeon was doing.

"It is for his own protection, Frank," Aaron said, once he was done with the last of the restraints. "We can't have him making any sudden movements during the procedure. Also, they'll keep him from getting injured by falling off the bed if he has another seizure."

"Is that a possibility?" Frank asked, hating the fact they had to do this with each passing second.

"I'll do my best to prevent any such incident."

"What are you doing?" Joe slurred, frowning at his wrists and the cuffs around them. He had finally realised that he couldn't move his arms or legs. "Whatever you stuck to my eyebrow, it's itchy," he informed Aaron earnestly, blinking hard to focus his glassy gaze on the surgeon.

"Frank," Riley finally broke her silence and walked over to Joe's bed, glaring at both of them all the way, making her opinions on the entire operation abundantly clear. "What's wrong with him?"

"I've given him a mild anaesthetic to keep him semi-conscious," Aaron explained as he adjusted the lead on Joe's forehead to stop him from fidgeting to rub the side of his head against the pillow. "I need him awake but not too aware while we do this," he looked down pointedly at Joe as he said the rest. "And he needs to stay as still as possible."

"Okay." Joe smiled blearily and yawned.

"He gets really weird when he's under any kind of anaesthetic," Frank explained to Riley who looked concerned about Joe's confused, child-like behaviour. "It's normal. For him."

"Is this thing, whatever you're going to do now," she said, her voice hard with barely controlled anger. "Is it gonna hurt him?"

"Don't know," Aaron replied cheerily, rubbing his hands together, oblivious to the heated glare he received from the ex-army sergeant. "It's not like we've done this before. But, the good news is, his doctor is right here. He'll be fine."

Riley muttered something under her breath and went over to one of the chairs that were near a set of secondary screens and dropped heavily into it. Frank figured her choice of the spot was to keep an eye on Joe while they progressed, instead of what they managed to unearth by accessing his implant.

Aaron moved behind the bed and plugged a connector from one of the Spearhead's processors to the nearest medical scanner that was connected to the leads from Joe's forehead, completing the circuit to convey the signals from Joe's brain and the implant to the supercomputer.

"Alright, Frank, if we are ready, we can start now," Aaron stood near the scanner connected to the computer with his own handheld screen, to monitor the process from the medical end. Frank took his place in the middle of the platform and called up the system with a gesture from his gloved hand.

Spearhead came to life around him with all the readings from Joe's monitors duplicated before him in minute detail.

"What do you want me to do?"

"I'm connecting the signal and the data streams from the implant to the servers now," Aaron said, tapping on his handheld screen.

A new window opened on the holoscreen with a rundown of the microchip's details; its make and composition, data storage, processing power and a command prompt for self-diagnostics.

"Run the self-diagnostics first," Aaron directed. "You need to open the supporting software I sent you earlier and let them run alongside the chip's diagnostics."

Frank set up the relevant programmes and let them do what the surgeon wanted. After a few seconds, the screen updated, informing him that no issues have been found. "It's done. All green across the board."

Just as the words left his mouth, the screen updated again. The entire sphere lit up with endless streams of numbers that scrolled all over the screen at dizzying speeds, making it look as if Frank had just become the eye of a hurricane made entirely out of swirling ones and zeros.

"Alright," Aaron said, walking over to the base of the platform to peer at the chaotic holosphere. There was a curious grin on his face as he studied the bizarre code with a gleam in his eyes.

"The rest it is a guessing game, Hardy," he said quietly, his focus glued to the screen.

"All I'm seeing is meaningless and incomplete code, Aaron," Frank informed the surgeon, making a few gestures here and there to redirect or entirely change a data stream or two, trying to figure out the heads and tails of the unintelligible info dump.

"This is your brother's mind," Aaron said, his voice filled with awe as he stared at the fruits of his own ingenious labour. They were literally seeing the numeric representation of an active human mind for the first time after all.

"The numbers basically represent what happens inside the brain when the neurons fire and thoughts occur," Aaron kept talking as he switched his gaze back and forth from his own screen to the number-filled, transparent dome around them. "Now, this is where your expertise comes in, Hardy," he said, grinning at Frank. "You need to try and coax memories out of this jumble of signals."

Frank sighed and concentrated on the data streams. It was as if trying to pluck a certain string out of a large bowl full of spaghetti to find a beginning or an end of a line, a point to start. He let the numbers run before his eyes, not really focusing on any particular one, but seeing them all switch and change as a whole. After a long while, certain, discernible patterns started to emerge in the otherwise jumbled mess of streams.

He started to pluck the strings that seemed to make sense to him and moved to drop them in the places where he thought they'd fit better. The streams changed and rippled as he made the changes, accepting and adapting to his input without a complaint. It was as if Frank could see puzzle pieces that floated around without direction or purpose, and when he plucked them out to put them in their correct places, they fitted in to make more sense out of the shattered and dissolved images.

"Keep doing what you're doing," Frank was so deep in the system, he heard Aaron's excited voice as if it was coming from somewhere far away. "It's working,"

As Frank worked, a coherent picture started to emerge from within the chaos. The system picked up on Frank's direction and guidance to speed up the process, moving the data streams and scrolling numbers into their fitting slots. Then, when Frank diverted another data stream to a different flow, the entire sphere brightened and refreshed. Frank had to turn his gaze away and blink rapidly a few times to clear the spots he had in his eyes due to the sudden flash.

When he finally turned his gaze back to the screen, he felt the bottom falling off of his entire world.

All those madly swirling numbers that filled the entire sphere were gone. In their place, now there were clear concise images; hundreds, thousands, millions of small, rectangular, lively snapshots. All of them were very colourful and painfully bright as they moved and flowed serenely around the sphere. They were also supremely unconcerned about the impact they had on their four viewers.

Frank's gaze followed their movement on its own accord, unable to look away from those images even for a second. He was utterly horrified and sick to his stomach because he knew those images. He recognized almost all of them. Hell, he was in most of them. It didn't take that long for him to realise that what he had just cleaned up and put up here on this screen for the entire world to see, was the entirety of his brother's lifelong memories.

Aaron also watched, his eyes roaming around the holosphere, eagerly following everything with a manic grin on his face, supremely satisfied and elated at his own success.

Turning his head to his right, Frank saw Riley had abandoned her chair to go stand by Joe who was also staring at the screen in wide-eyed terror. Her face was pale and her expression was contorted in horrified disgust at what they had just done.

She saw Frank's guilt-filled gaze and gave him a head shake that screamed disappointment before looking away to focus on Joe, clearly uncomfortable at looking at something that was not hers to witness.

Frank closed his eyes and breathed deeply to keep the bile from rising in his throat to spew out onto the platform. He felt his ears buzz and his entire body tremble as the enormity of what he had just done dawned on him. Not only had he just wrenched everything out from inside his brother's mind, but he had just cleared it all up and put it on display as if it was nothing.

Joe's entire life was now plastered all over the holosphere like a macabre soap opera on mute.

Determined in his own righteous crusade to locate his missing wife, he had just violated his brother's privacy, his mind, his thoughts and memories in the most disgusting and callous way possible.

"Frank?" Joe's slow, tentative voice dragged him out of his own drowning guilt and brought him back to the present.

"Shit, Joe," Frank cursed and looked up. Lost in his own mind, he had forgotten that he needed to stop this madness.

"Let me just… fuck. Aaron–" he barked at the surgeon who was still intent on the memories playing on the screen. He wanted to claw the man's eyes out to stop him from so freely ogling something that wasn't his to watch. He held his anger back with force, knowing that it was his own fault in the first place that Joe's entire life was cracked open to play itself in a reel like this before them.

"Aaron, damn it, this isn't what we wanted. How do I clear it?" Because, as much as he gestured and sent command after command, the memories refused to fade.

"Wait, Frank," Aaron yelled, holding up a hand. "This is exactly what we wanted."

"Frank, what's going on?" Joe's voice was childlike, scared. He was still under the influence of the drugs the surgeon had given him earlier. "Why are my memories floating around your head?"

He sounded as if he was hurting too. Frank couldn't bring himself to look at his brother. What he needed to do was fix this mess and stop this violation. "Joe, please, it's okay," he said, trying to restart the entire system as a last desperate attempt. "I'll fix this."

The images finally started to disappear, one by goddamn one, oh so slowly as the Spearhead finally caught on to the fact that Frank wanted it to stop harvesting and displaying his brother's memories.

"Hardy, no," Aaron protested, tapping away at his handheld in rapid succession. "Look for Lexi. She's here somewhere."

"No, she's not, damn it." Frank roared. "Stop restarting the damn data streams."

"Why do you say that?"

"Look over there," Frank pointed to the anomaly that stood apart from the rest. There were five black, blank spots, floating with the rest of the images, resolutely keeping Joe's memories of those five harrowing days still firmly out of their grasp. "He doesn't remember. It's not there. This has gone far enough. I need to stop this goddamn show now."

"Please, stop it," Joe was pleading now, his voice cracking as if he was having trouble breathing. "I'm not feeling good, Frank, please!"

"His pulse is rising, and he's bleeding out of his nose, a lot," Riley yelled, holding Joe firmly by the shoulders as he struggled. "Get here and do something, doctor."

Aaron, instead of going to help Joe, climbed onto the platform and caught on Frank's biceps in vice-like grips. "Keep focusing on the blank images, Frank," he urged, shouting over Riley's cursing and Joe's pained grunts. "You can clean it up. She's right here."

"Jesus fuck! Get over here, he's seizing!" Riley screamed.

"Frank needs to–"

"Are you two so far gone that you're willing to trade one life for another–"

Frank pushed the surgeon with one hand and sent the last hurried command to the system to wipe everything clean before jumping off the platform to run to his brother. Joe's entire body was writhing on the bed, only staying there thanks to the restraints and the way Riley had him pinned to the bed by his shoulders.

"Aaron–" Frank yelled at the doctor who reached the bed only a second after him.

"I'm on it." The surgeon quickly inserted a prepped needle from a tray he had placed by the bed earlier and injected something into the port on the back of Joe's left hand. The worst of the shakes started to subdue as the drugs started to take effect. Then, to make it all worse, the heartbeat monitor blared to life with a loud, uneven tone, announcing an irregularity in Joe's breathing patterns and heartbeat. Aaron cursed and injected him with two more needles in rapid succession, while Frank and Riley stood helpless on the opposite sides, staring at Joe's entirely unresponsive figure.

Finally, after what felt like a lifetime, the monitors around Joe went silent.

"Alright, he should be fine, now," Aaron said, double-checking Joe's stats on the monitors. "He should be able to sleep it off."

The room then plunged into complete darkness as the holosphere blanked out, switching off the entire Spearhead system.

"Whoa," Aaron exclaimed out loud, looking around to locate the source of new trouble. "What the hell?"

Frank stayed where he was, his gaze still fixed on Joe's unconscious figure, unconcerned. He was expecting the darkness just as he knew the lights were going to come back in exactly seven seconds.

"It's a system reboot," he said when the surgeon tried to move away from the medical monitors, which were the only source of light for the moment.

"System reboot!" Aaron yelled, frustrated. "Frank, it's going delete everything we just dug up–"

"Yeah, I know," Frank muttered, suddenly feeling weary to the bone. "That's why I did it. What we were looking for, wasn't there,"

That stopped Aaron short. He stared at Frank, wide-eyed, refusing to believe that Frank had destroyed all the information they just received. "But Frank, the data, the process…I need–"

"It's all gone," Frank cut him off, just as the room reset back to natural, preset light settings, bathing the entire area in a bright fluorescent glow. Frank could now clearly see the disbelieving glare etched on the surgeon's face. "The last command I gave was a complete system wipe."

"What?!"

"That was my brother's entire mind, Aaron, for fucks sake," Frank said slowly, carefully, so that there was no misunderstanding. He had redirected all the data streams back to the implant and wiped all of Joe's memories from the Spearhead for good. Since the moment he had received the news of Lexi's disappearance, this felt like the first right thing he had done after all those days. "I wasn't going to let any of that stay behind on a goddamn server."

"Fine, fine," Aaron raised his hands in surrender, shaking his head. "Now that we know what to do, we can isolate those five blank days and–"

"No." Frank ground out, cutting him off. It seemed that he hadn't gotten the message through to his friend yet. He was done. They were done. He saw Riley's firm nod in his periphery. She was agreeing with his decision.

"Excuse me?"

"I said, no," Frank said, matching Aaron's frown with a narrow-eyed glare of his own. "We are not doing anything like that ever again."

"But Frank–"

"We are done, Aaron."

The finality in his tone made the surgeon angry. "So what? We just let her go, is that it? She's my friend too." he snarled.

"And she's my wife," Frank replied through gritted teeth. "I'm not giving up. I'll find a way. But not this."

Aaron's face went red as his anger took over. He moved a step closer, stepping into Frank's personal space. Frank held his head high and squared his shoulders, standing his ground, willing to headbutt the surgeon into seeing sense if it was necessary.

"Fine, Hardy, whatever," Aaron muttered in quiet fury. "Let me know the details of her funeral." He spat. "I'll try to attend."

Frank stayed where he was, his expression hard and unchanged as the surgeon stormed out of the room after spitting out his vitriol.

"I'll handle him," Riley threw over her shoulder as she also left the room, intent on following the surgeon. "Stay with Joe."

"Thanks, Riley," Frank called after her as the door closed behind her, leaving him alone with his unconscious brother.

Frank methodically released all the restraints from his brother's wrists and ankles before using the wipes from the first aid kit to clean most of the blood off his face. The monitors around him stayed peacefully silent, letting him know that Joe was in a deep slumber. He let out another tired sigh and dragged the chair Riley occupied earlier closer to Joe's bed to drop heavily into it. He then took one of Joe's limp, clammy hands and held it in both his, needing physical contact to convince him that Joe was still there.

Frank needed him there for a chance to apologise and try his best to make it right. As long as Joe was around, there was still time for Frank to fix what he had broken. He just hoped with all his heart that the damage he had done was not beyond repair.