.Hack: Relapse
A .Hack fanfiction by Renfro Calhoun
Disclaimer: Blah blah me no own etc. etc... seriously, does anybody even read these? I've said it 26 times already, I think you can safely assume it applies to this chapter too :)
Notes: Happens during Outbreak. (Thoughts), [text/writing], {email domains}. And now, to reveal all the answers! I... kinda wish I had more to add there, but really, there's not much else to say. I mean, I could make stuff up, but I think that would be insulting both our intelligence, here. In conclusion, "Call of Duty" is the best WW2 FPS to date.
C&C is/are still welcome. Read on!
Chapter 27 – Loyalty
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He heard the footsteps down the short hall, soft thumps that were nonetheless clearly audible over the quiet humming of his computer and the ticking of a wall clock. His door – a light plywood, reinforced in the middle with a sturdy polymer – lay ajar expectantly.
The door was his primary defense against potential intruders. Aside from that, he had several means at his disposal to deter an unexpected guest: a button for the silent alarm, specifically designed to blend into the desk; the burly security guard in the hall, just strong enough not to need the Browning HP or nightstick hooked onto his belt; Moritsu himself, trained in close-quarters combat and, despite a lack of muscle or practice, could deliver a crippling blow if necessary.
As Seijiro Tanaka entered his field of view, Francis couldn't help but briefly ponder using one of them.
The programmer calmly strolled into the administrator's office, stopping only to show his ID badge to the guard outside. "What's this about, Frank?" he asked in a slow, flat voice that implied he already knew.
Francis watched him carefully; without looking, he reached up and spun his flat-screen monitor around, showing the on-screen contents to Seijiro. "I was hoping you could tell me," he replied. "You want to confess now, or do I have to ask?"
Seijiro's blue eyes narrowed as he stepped forward, scanning the glowing text. "What is this?"
"Recorded dialogue between two players and an entity within 'The World'," explained Francis. "A fragment of an A.I. Harald encoded into the game to stop Morganna."
"So?"
The administrator nodded to him. "Keep reading."
A long moment of silence passed the men as Seijiro read the log on display, slowly absorbing the words and their meaning. His face tensed briefly, then relaxed into a resigned expression of defeat. "Damn it," he whispered.
Frank suddenly gazed upon his co-worker with a look of mixed dismay and pity. "I don't even know where to begin asking questions, Seijiro... so why don't you start by telling me what happened to Harald."
Lifting his head up from the computer screen, Seijiro faced his accuser.
-
"I said, THAT'S ENOUGH! I don't want to hear any more of your inane babbling about some girl! Just tell me what the hell is going on!"
Taking a deep breath, he steadied his aim, keeping the revolver trained on the stairwell door. "I told you everything," he said into a cell phone, clutched firmly in his free hand. "She is proof of my love for her."
He winced as the speaker's sharp voice cut into his ear. "But what does it mean?? What in god's name were you trying to do?!"
The door burst open; rifle-mounted flashlights illuminated the darkened hallway as monstrous black-clad men charged through.
"Kommen sie nahrer nicht!" he shouted, pulling the trigger once and loosing a shot at the nearest figure. The bullet bounced harmlessly off the armor, though it succeeded in knocking him back a pace.
He frowned. "Es ist zu spat..."
His advantage lost, he turned and ran down the hall, ducking around the nearest corner and through an open door. "If only she could have seen," he began, and was cut off in mid-sentence as he doubled over, struggling to catch his breath. "She would know."
"Look, just come out and tell us what we're dealing with. Nothing's gonna happen to you, I promise." There was a desperate, almost hopeless quality to the speaker's voice, and that mattered more to him than the actual words.
Hearing footsteps, he made a conscious effort to speak into the phone. "I could have stopped her, but the choice is no longer mine to make."
The flashlights flickered through the door. Instinctively, he raised his gun and fired, emptying what was left of its ammo at the blank wall facing the office door. "Stay away from me!" he shouted before turning around and running, down yet another hallway – virtually indistinguishable from the one he had left, lit in a faint blue hue from the moon through a side window.
"Harald! What's going on?!"
"Ich brauche mehr Zeit," he muttered, not caring if the person on the other end could hear or understand him; he jammed the phone between his shoulder and ear, and pointed the revolver in the direction he had come from. Remembering that it was empty, he broke it open and frantically started digging through his pockets, loading spare shells into the now-barren chambers.
Finished reloading, the white-haired man spoke into the phone. "But I still have one choice."
"Herr Hoerwick!"
Frantically, Harald scrambled through the nearest door, and found himself in an office – desk in the corner, computer on the desk, chair and wastebasket before it. The computer was on, a menu on the screen prompting him: [phase 4 initialized; beginning installation of command directives].
Closing and locking the door, Harald strolled over to the computer and set the phone down on the desk. He collapsed into the chair and coughed, loudly. "Just a little longer," he whispered. "Just a little longer..."
Progress bars danced across the screen. Hearing their footsteps, shouted orders in his country's language, he began rocking back and forth, heart pounding frantically. "They're coming... they're closing in. How did they know? How did they find me?"
The voice came through the phone again, smaller thanks to its distance from Harald's ear. "Listen, I can get you out of this, but you have to trust me. These men aren't who you think they are."
The lights flashed beneath the doorway. "Herr Hoerwick! Dies ist die Polizei!" The voice was distant, almost as if from outside the building. "Stellen sie ihre Waffe hin und kommen Sie mit ihren Handen auf heraus!"
He threw a panicked glance at the screen, and felt a chill as he saw the bar had only filled halfway. In a heartbeat, he clicked the 'cancel' button, and reached for a nearby set of goggles, which he hastily crammed over his head and activated.
"This might be the only way... I hope this works like it's supposed to."
Pulling out the keyboard, he blindly entered a set of directives into an unseen command prompt; flashes of code and text suddenly whirled past his visor, striking his retinas relentlessly.
He heard the doorknob rattle, and his hand found the revolver once more.
"Harald, for god's sake, listen to me! Those men are CIA! They want you alive!"
The words came through loud and clear, and it stopped Harald cold. He felt the barrel rest against his right temple, but his finger never touched the trigger. More lines of code, and the door gave a mighty CRACK as it was brutally kicked in.
"He knew."
"Schiessen sie ihn!"
A single, deafening explosion; he felt something hard and small strike him squarely in the chest, blowing him backwards in his chair and throwing him into a violent whiplash. Instinctively he squeezed the trigger, but it was too late; the gun wasn't even close enough to cause powder burns, instead firing straight into the ceiling and doing no harm to any living thing.
His vision was still blanked by the visor, which he had felt disconnect from the terminal when he was tossed backwards; he felt a brief sensation of falling, and then tumbled out of the chair as it collided roughly with the ground.
The goggles were pulled away, but the throbbing pain in his chest forced Harald to squint and grimace, minimizing what could be seen. He felt hands grab him roughly and hoist him aloft. One of them spoke roughly into his ear, "You don't get off that easily."
As two of the men dragged him from the room, he heard a third speaking in Japanese; "Thank you for your assistance, Mr. Tanaka."
-
"...I tried to reason with him, but it was too late; my phone was secure, but they intercepted it going to his cell phone."
Francis looked upon his associate with new eyes; dismay and pity were still present, and along for the ride were at least a dozen other comparable emotions, and a touch of speechlessness to boot.
"CIA agents tracked him to an office building in Frankfurt and posed as a German SWAT team. That is where he encoded himself into 'The World', and I would wager that's the last time he's seen the light of day since."
Moritsu closed his eyes. "So, where is he now?"
"Unless he hung himself with his bedsheets, I would imagine he is still one Dietrich Hermann, small-time arms dealer who's been imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for the past twenty-four months."
The administrator felt a pool of bile begin bubbling up in the pit of his stomach, regardless of where the fluid was meant to go. "So you were CIA the whole time..."
"DoD," corrected Seijiro. "I worked with the CIA on ARPANET and Echelon, but the latter, as I said, was a bust. You know I worked for the U.S. government... well, that's what I was working on."
"Why did they bother to tell you all this, if you don't work for the government anymore?"
"I'm still an asset. And when they found out that my software worked with Harald's Morganna program, I became an opportunity." He sighed. "They wanted to pick Harald's brain over Morganna, find out what made her tick, how she succeeded with the Echelon code where their A.I. failed. And I'd... well, we all tried to track him down."
"Yeah," said Francis, "but you found him."
"As did they."
The two locked eyes, blue on blue, one intense and judgmental, the other pained and haunted. Somewhere between a second and a hour, Francis spoke again. "I don't even know where to begin with you. You lied to me and everyone at this company, and might even be responsible for what Morganna has become."
"There's more than that," Tanaka interrupted. "They're here, in Tokyo, and they're trying to tie up all the loose ends."
"Why am I not surprised," was Frank's retort. "You still giving them pointers?"
"I don't have a choice. Either I tell them what they want to know, or they 'suicide' me. I told you, as long as they're still trying to put together an A.I., they're going to keep me on a short leash. I couldn't do a damn thing to help."
"You could've gone to the police; for god's sake, Seijiro, you could've come to me. We could've worked something out before all this got out of hand!"
"You don't think I feel guilty about this?" he suddenly asked. "You think I enjoy sitting around doing nothing while that... that thing wreaks havoc in 'The World', just waiting for a chance to get into the global network?"
"I don't know what to think," Francis said calmly. "Except that you should've come to me sooner. Now, what you've told me might not matter anymore."
"I know... but there's nothing else I can do. With the CIA keeping an eye on me, my hands were tied."
"So what do you need?"
Seijiro turned away to one side, staring into a wall. "I'll tell you anything you want to know right now, we'll sort all this out, but they have to be stopped, and soon. The whole damn thing has to be exposed, what they've been doing..."
"And how do we do that?" asked Francis. "Call the police?"
"Not good enough. We need proof aside from my word. The kind we could probably only get from them."
Another pause in conversation, hostilities and tension momentarily forgotten as the two men faced the grim reality of their situation. Again, the computer and the clock were the only things making noise in the room, humming and clicking ceaselessly.
"Wait," said Francis. "Earlier today, you mentioned an American that came with the police..."
"Right, Dean Stollis," answered Seijiro. "It seems you were right; he HAS been persistent. In fact, my liaison with the Agency..." his speech slowed, mentally coming to some unspoken realization, "...said they wanted him out of the way..."
"Heh," grunted Francis, swiveling to his left in his chair. "Well, they have their work cut out for them, that's for sure." The lack of response prompted him to face Seijiro once again. He crooked an eyebrow curiously. "What are you doing?"
His younger co-worker was now lightly touching a plastic pen to the on- screen keypad of his PDA, punching in a short sentence and hitting the 'send' button.
"What are you doing?" asked Francis again, looking oddly at the tiny electronic device.
Without looking up, Seijiro answered, "Taking sides."
- End of Chapter 27