A/N: Whoa, definitely the longest chapter in Liberi Fatali so far. Can't believe I finished it in just two sittings, but hey, it's a school break, and I intend to make the most of it. XD This chapter is pretty much a very crucial turning point of the story and there's a lot of lengthy monologues because of all the explanations, but at least the difficult part's done. ^^ (@ Zerohour - no, I haven't seen Avalon ^^;;)
Oh yes, apologies for Chapter 5; I gave Graipaul the wrong first name. My bad. It's supposed to be Remi, not Rene.
Chapter Six:
Invenite
The air was musty and thick.
Mireille pursed her lips, grimly staring at the checkerboard shooting squad. Then she looked down again at the unmoving elevator, and up to where the shaft to the duct of the cybercafe was. There was quite a distance.
Kinomoto sounded resigned and he had dropped his trigger arm. "My orders from Graipaul were as such: if we were to find ourselves in a predicament like this, I should get both of you out to the best of my powers. If I should fail, I must terminate myself, and perhaps you too. At all costs, we must not be caught alive."
"You are much too pessimistic, Monsieur Kinomoto," Mireille murmurred, her brain rapidly assessing the situation. "This is not yet the end. We still have an advantage over them."
"What is that?"
Mireille nodded towards the gunmen whose firearms were trained at the three fugitives. "They were given the order not to kill, because if they had been otherwise, we would have been dead by now." A thin, hard smile laced the ends of her lips. "However, we were given no such orders, much to our own fortune."
"Mademoiselle Bouquet, they still will shoot."
"Not if they can help it." Mireille flicked her eyelids and looked at Akira with the corner of her eye shortly. "You have not told us the entire story, Kinomoto, but something tells us that Schwarz wants us alive." She checked the calibration of her pistols, nodding. "But like you said, it will not stop them from shooting. If we show the likeliest chance of escaping, there will be no restraint from them." Mireille paused and glanced up from the guns, looking behind Kinomoto. Her features softened. "How is she?"
"Frightened."
Mireille had already turned away, the moment gone, as she returned surveying the number of men they would have to take down. Her voice was emotionless. "We'll have to hurry. They will be sending more men behind us as we speak." Her eyes were busy checking the thick pipelines attached on the walls that led upwards. "We will have to scale up to the air duct by hand."
"What?" He was incredulous.
"Grab Kirika and have her hang from your neck down to your front torso. Shimmy up the pipelines with her, your back facing the gunmen. Act as her human shield; the pipes will hold your weight." She cocked her guns with steady, unfalteringly hands. "I'll cover you both. They won't be able to get all of us at the same time if we divide their efforts. I'll follow once I'm through."
Kinomoto had gently pulled Kirika out and she was clutching him tightly on the front already, but her large doe-eyes were still staring at Mireille. Much of her initial fear of Mireille had dissipated, but the Corsican could still see the lingering doubt in her eyes.
Kinomoto had only one thing to say as he grabbed a pipe and pushed his leg on the wall to brace himself, and it was the same thing she had been thinking of herself. "Can you do it on your own?"
Mireille lifted an eyebrow archly. "Twenty-four men?" She shifted her eyes to the panoramic view of the checkerboard and back to Kirika. "We'll just have to find out then, don't we?" She blinked and pursed her lips resignedly again before saying, "Take care of her."
Kinomoto swung out and hoisted himself up the pipes, with Kirika hanging under him.
The lone, flaxen-haired gunwoman watched silently as her opponents suddenly noted their targets' separate actions and radioed each other in panic. Not waiting for them to confirm their actions, she heaved a breath and slowly brought her guns up to chin level and fired.
And she truly realized that this was the first in a long time that she would have to fight on her own. She could only hope that she had not been too reliant on Kirika's unearthly skills to remember her own.
But there was not time for more epiphanies. The second she had let fly her first two bullets, the men had collectively recoiled as one of them died instantly the moment the bullet smashed his skull and the other received the other bullet in his vest, although not fatally. But the men left recovered speedily and four men, by some mutual understanding, methodically multi-tasked by having two concentrate on bringing Kinomoto and Kirika down while the other two began firing at Mireille, although with noticeable caution so as not to kill her. The other gunmen were still inactive, moving only to shoot by pre-meditated fours again if Mireille was finished with the former four, and this meticulousness unnerved her as it gave the very strong impression that they had a lot more men to spare.
And there was only one of her firing back. And she was bound to get tired soon.
Mireille swore under her breath as she evaded the bullets and tried to get a perfect aim at their perpetrators' foreheads. The chasm was of great distance and it was difficult to get a good aim through the thick, yellow dust of the chamber. She sidestepped a bullet aimed at her leg and whirled to fire blindly at the same direction. This awarded her with another infuriatingly-systematic rain of bullets aimed at everywhere except her forehead and her chest.
No, this was not going to be a fast and intense stint, the one she was used to. Mireille narrowed her already-tired eyes. They meant to draw this confrontation into a long and tedious battle of nerves, and she knew all too well that she was on the losing side. It would be costly for Schwarz's men, yes, but they would be able to immobilize their targets without killing them. Schwarz was not one to be over-estimated. And he had men to spare, like a silent, chillingly-unmoving army of black.
She gave a quick glance at Kinomoto's progress as she awkwardly jumped up from a crouch, the duct she was standing on giving her not much free space. Carrying Kirika, the Japanese was halfway up the extend of the pipe to the cybercafe, as he had to shy away from the bullets aimed at himself and retaliate if he could with his own gun with one arm.
A bullet came frighteningly close enough, almost grazing Mireille on the arm. She winced reflexively as her other arm shot out and pumped lead, and then she heard the loud hob-nailed bootfalls from the back of her duct, dust sprinkling on her head as the force of their feet shook the duct. She paled. The others were coming for her.
"Kinomoto!" Mireille suddenly slid onto her back and flattened herself, two arms out and firing upside down. She gingerly shoved her head out into the edge of the duct and shouted, "They're coming!"
The footfalls grew louder and nearer and Mireille could already see their shadows coming for her. Her eyes widened. There was no time. In a moment's decision, she had swung herself from the duct and had clambered up against the pipe, her back exposed to the gunmen, and as she shimmied up the thick circular conduit, she could only pray desperately.
Kinomoto and Kirika were nearly at the top, but before Mireille could take comfort at this, one bullet finally took advantage of her and drove deep, squarely, into her left thigh, piercing almost the bone. Mireille gave an involuntary cry as a supernova of nerves burst from her senses from the pain. Kinomoto spontaneously glanced at her at the sound, but she waved at him furiously away, blinking away her tears.
"Go! I'm all right!" she bellowed, starting to feel dizzy. She gripped the pipe harder with her white-knuckled hands and forced her other knee to push her up. Another bullet poinged just mere inches away from her and she almost let go from the terrifying proximity of the aim. She panted brokenly as she felt every sinew and muscle struggle tremblingly to pull her up. She was not going to last very long at this state.
Arm haul, leg push, arm haul, leg push. More bullets, and the interval between bullet ringing after another was getting shorter and shorter as the armed men became more aware of their escape. She cringed and looked up, her breath short and strangled. Only ten feet left. The two were already in the designated duct and Kinomoto was extending an arm towards her while simultaneously firing at some of the gunmen himself.
A pellet smashed into the pipe above her head, but the sudden sight of Kirika huddled uselessly beside Kinomoto had sent such a flood of fury coursing throughout Mireille that she became deaf to the ring of bullets as she doggedly pushed herself up inch by inch, foot by foot, fixated by the one single idea that she must get Kirika restored to her old self, she would, she had to...
"Let's go," was what Kinomoto greeted her with as he finally pulled her up into the duct with them. They dropped to their knees and quickly made their way through the sinuous air duct leading to the cybercafe. Mireille had to bite her lip to keep herself from moaning as she felt her would split open afresh again and again...
When her sight began to cloud as she lost more blood, she was nearly at the verge of silent tears. This was too much to handle. This was too much for one girl to handle. Where was Kirika when she needed her-?!
An unexpected sob uncharacteristically welled inside her and tried to surface, but she quelled it and it came out as a strange, constipated sound. Her arms were weakening and her shot leg had lost all feeling. The air duct seemed to go forever. She sank closer to the ground and tried to grope her way. The gap between herself and the other two was widening increasingly. She shivered.
She only heard the sound of loud, booted footsteps before she unwillingly slipped into a wretched unconsciousness.
She could hear people talking in soft, muted whispers, but she could not catch the words. She was lying on something soft yet sturdy, and there was a numb, throbbing ache somewhere on her leg.
Mireille opened her eyes. She was in a small, dark room, lit only by a small night light set on a desk where two vague figures were seated, whispering. A window was open, framed by curtains, and she could feel the night breeze entering the room accompanied by the sound of cars honking from far away.
She sat up with a groan, coming up from the sheets that had covered her, and the two figures by the desk turned to her at the sound.
"Ms. Bouquet." The relief in Akira Kinomoto's was instantly recognizable. The young man hastily made his way towards the side of his bed, leaving Kirika seated by the table. His right arm was slung in a cast and there was a piece of plaster on his cheek. "How are you feeling?"
"Where are we?" Mireille's voice was dazed as looked around in bewilderment, trying to get her bearings. "And what happened to you?"
"We're in a safe place now," he answered, pulling a chair to sit beside her. He tried to lift his broken arm and he winced, smiling feebly. "You passed out, but we carried you and managed to get out of there. Got some injuries along the way."
"Kirika-?"
"Just a few cuts and bruises. She's fine."
Mireille leaned back against the pillow, closing her eyes. "How long was I out? And how did you get out?"
"You've been sleeping for five hours. As to your second question..." Akira shoved his glasses up in apparent eagerness. "I had managed to radio for back-up to wait for us outside the facility, but we still couldn't have made our way out of that place if it wasn't for her."
Mireille opened one eye. "Her? You mean Kirika?"
"Yes." Kinomoto shoved his glasses up again with such excited violence that they nearly fell off from his nose. "It was unbelievable, Ms. Bouquet, just unbelievable. It was like her body knew what she was doing, but her head didn't."
"What do you mean? What did she do? Are you sure she's unhurt?" Mireille was fully awake now.
"Yes, yes, yes, she is fine." Akira wrung his hands and he could hardly keep a broad, boyish grin from his face. "We have not lost her, Ms. Bouquet. As far as her muscle memory is concerned, she is still every inch the Noir that she is."
Akira paused and Mireille waited, suddenly hopeful.
"By the time we realized that you had fainted, we already had a squad crawling in the cybercafe's air duct towards us, and I really thought this was the end. I loaded a fresh magazine into my gun (I thought that I was at least going to die trying), but then Kirika suddenly snatched it away from me." Akira gestured incoherently. "It was like she was in a trance or something; she looked like she was possessed. Her eyes were all glassy and empty, but her body sure knew what she was doing."
"What did she do?" asked Mireille impatiently.
"She killed all of them, Ms. Bouquet, every single one of the squad who came after us." Kinomoto thumped his hand on his knee with thrilled emphasis. "Every single one. She was shooting them right on their foreheads, killing them right and left, leaving no one alive. It was...it was like magic, Ms. Bouquet. She just obliterated them, one shot for one head. No bullets wasted. I was carrying you and we just plowed through all of them." Akira shook his head in wonderment. "She is a strange and unearthly thing, Ms. Bouquet. Where did you manage to find someone like her?"
Mireille could not stop the smile on her face. "She came to me, Monsieur Kinomoto." She turned her eyes to the girl herself who was still staring back at her, unblinking. She hesitated. "But you said she was not herself when she was doing that?"
"No, she wasn't." Akira himself hesitated. "I am not sure how to explain this, Ms. Bouquet, but I don't think she was in full possession of her wits when she did that. It was like she was sleep-walking. I just can't explain it, miss. It was as if her body was doing all those without her conscious mind being in control of it. She acted only under the automatic muscle control directed by the cerebellum of her brain in reaction to a situation that asked for actions like those." He paused. "I am not certain, but I think this business of her not being able to remember her original self is merely psychological and not mental. It's just a state of mind she's trapped in. It's not brain damage or anything. The girl who came back with you here is the same girl, with the same muscle patterns and instinct of a fantastic assassin, with the same brain. When I unplugged both of you, Schwarz had not yet managed to implant her with false memories nor had reformatted her consciousness, as I had initially feared. "Akira snapped his fingers in perplexity. "But there's just something in her mind - there's something keeping her from realizing who she really is."
Mireille was quiet, although she had started visibly when Akira mentioned false memories and reformatting consciousness. Then she had looked thoughtful, bit back her anxiety, and said simply, "I think it's time you told us everything."
"First I'd better see if you're all right."
"But-"
"What I have to say will be a matter of great shock for you, Ms. Bouquet, and I want to make sure that you are in the proper condition to receive it. How is your leg?"
Mireille hurriedly drew away the covers from her leg to reveal her bullet wound neatly swathed in bandages. "It feels fine. You did this?"
"I had a Soldat paramedic disinfect it and pull out the bullet. It's not bothering you anymore?"
"I can hardly feel it. Thank you. Now you must tell me."
Much to her impatience, Akira stood up and and walked back to the desk where Kirika was, taking up a simmering bowl of soup and handing it to Mireille. "Here. Eat while you listen. You must regain your strength."
"Thank you."
"Good." Akira resumed his position on the chair, looking a little uncertain. "Where shall I start?"
"Try from the beginning." Mireille swallowed a spoonful.
"Very well. The Soldats will be a starting point as good as any." He bent and leaned his elbows against his knees, placing his chin on his knuckles, a faraway look in his eyes. "As I had said earlier, there are two most heated, warring factions in the Soldat organization. The faction headed by Graipaul, the one I come from, wants to wash their hands off this entire Noir business and leave you two alone. However, the other one, the one headed by Schwarz, wants to take Noir for their own machinations as the fueling power of the entire Soldat organization. You know the strength of Kirika, let alone both of you; you have no idea what sort of power that would be in the Soldat's hands "
Mireille's eyes were fiery. "What do you mean, 'take' us? They can't just take us. We're our own persons; they can't force us into doing their work or-"
"But you see, Schwarz does not want you." Akira shook his head vigorously as he interrupted her. "He does not want you, per se. He wants your Noir-ness, the thing that makes you Noir, what makes you two tick, what makes you kill so effectively. He wants your skills. He does not need your person to empower the Soldats. All he wants is all in here." Akira tapped his head. "You heard me telling you how Kirika acted earlier only under the control of her technical brain functions and without her full consciousness. Now imagine if you could isolate and take note of Kirika's brain patterns in the middle of their function while she is killing and put it into someone else's head. That someone else is not traditionally Noir, but he or she would have the brain patterns of one."
Mireille's eyes grew large and her mouth opened in horror. "What are you suggesting, Kinomoto?!"
Akira paused for breath. "Wilhelm Schwarz is a very accomplished theoretical neuro-scientist. He has earned numerous doctoral degrees and has won accolades all over the world. He is an an ambitious man, extremely loyal to the Soldat organization. He has worked long and hard and has invented something, extremely advanced for our times as he is sheer genius, that can isolate specific brain patterns during specific points of time, copy that information, and actually save it and transfer it into a specified receptacle - namely, even another brain. The exact same concept as copy-pasting in a computer. It's genius." There was clearly a note of awe in Kinomoto's voice, despite his position. "Not everyone is aware of it, but everything we are, from our reflexes, motor skills, any sort of conscious and unconscious movement - everything our body does that we don't even know of - originates from the brain. See!" The young man was virtually beside himself and he was gesticulating wildly. "Even the hormones that are produced by our endocrine system is controlled by our pituitary gland, the master gland of the body, which is in turn under the control of the hypothalamus, located in our brain stem. Another: in our cerebrum lie basal nuclei neurons which help control subconscious movement involved in such activities as walking or eating. Even something as specific as that, can you imagine! And look, even our ability to produce and feel emotions is under the control of our limbic system, which is located in many parts of our brain!"
Mireille had stopped eating and her soup lay untouched.
"Think, Ms. Bouquet," continued Akira after he had calmed down a little, "think if you had the chance to take the finest species of mankind, the Noir, the one who is the strongest in this survival of the fittest - think if you could put them in such a dangerous situation so as to bring out the best and the most brilliant of their survival skills, and then isolate and copy their current brain patterns while they are fending for their life and displaying their best capabilities to survive. From their brain stem, you can record how how much adrenaline is being pumped out. From their cerebrum, you can record the activity of their acute sensory reception, even how they speak. From the cerebellum, you can record their sense of balance, posture, and the coordination of their muscle activity. And everything else in between; like what the Americans call 'the whole enchilada.' And that is only the tip of the iceberg! Mademoiselle, from both your brains, because of this device he has invented, Schwarz can take the information and create his own little army of Noirs!"
"The entire Dreamscape scam..." Mireille was aghast. "The entire Dreamscape business was just a means to record our..." Her voice petered out from the shock.
"Yes, you are catching on, Ms. Bouquet! Yes! The Dreamscape hoax was merely a way to have you display all your Noir-ness so Schwarz could observe your brain activities without your knowledge of it. In the very basic level, Dreamscape is just a very high-tech video game, set in a very difficult and realistic level, that you and Kirika were plugged into through your subconsciousness. The Dreamscape machine makes use of a hypothalamus regulator that gives you the illusion of reality by feeding you specific nerve impulses. It's like an artificial dream machine; when you fell asleep, it controlled your hypothalamus to control what you will dream of. Because of the illusion of reality of dreams, you truly believed that what was going on was real, which, as a result, forced you to display the best of your abilities in your subconsciousness and made your brain react to the situation as it would accordingly."
Seeing that Mireille looked a little baffled, he obliged. "For example, why would you sweat after having a very bad dream when it didn't really happen? Because your brain was still reacting to it as if it had been real, and this is the exact concept Schwarz was using by imposing such dreams on you that required your brain to react to a dream as a Noir brain would react to a real situation. You also had nodes attached on you that received all the neuro-signals occuring in your brain as you 'played' the game and transmitted them into Schwarz's database. After he studies your brain patterns, he can discover what parts of your brain must be activated at what time during what activity, and he could produce nano-microchips of neurotransmitters with that same information to be implanted into other people's skulls to trigger impulses so they could 'move' or 'act' like you the same way your brain would react to situations. This is the emergence of nano-technology skull-sets already, things that only once existed in science fiction. Now he has made it into a reality. Do you remember all the things that were attached to you before you played Dreamscape? All of them were for this purpose."
The young man wiped his forehead. "This is his plan, Mademoiselle Bouquet; he will take the brains of Noir - simply put, the very essence of Noir - into an artificial neurotransmitter nano-microchip to be duplicated and implanted into the people of the Soldat. In the meantime, while his device still cannot erase the patterns of the true Noir from their own brains, he can implant them with a microchip composed of false memories and he could do whatever he likes with you. He is, in actuality, 'pirating' Noir - producing bootlegs, in a matter of speaking, and keeping the only originals under his thumb. With this sort of power mass-produced into our people, the Soldat can virtually take over the world."
There was a long, pregnant silence. Then Mireille said, "So it boils down to that, doesn't it? The Take-Over-The-World ploy?"
"I did say he was ambitious, Ms. Bouquet; of course he would try to take the highest ruling position."
There was another pause until Mireille herself shook her head and muttered, "That is devilish - devilishly genius. I can't believe we actually fell for that Dreamscape blabber."
"You can't help yourself, miss; right after the discovery that the Noir tradition was still alive under Altena, Schwarz suddenly was struck with this insane idea and he began to lay blueprints for the machines that would be needed and had everyone in his faction working 'round the clock, researching with him and manufacturing his devices. While you and Kirika and Chloe were barely out of diapers, Ms. Bouquet, he was already spending all those years agonizing over this, inventing his devices, making plans, keeping his eye on you through reports, sychronizing his machines, making his arguments as sound as possible, perfecting the entire scheme. The entire Soldat organization knew about this, but Graipaul's faction was the only one with enough clout to foil it, not to mention that he was the only one who thought it was unethical." Kinomoto gave a faint grin. "Enter me. Remi Graipaul had always been against this and he knew that it would be wise to know what was going on in Schwarz's facility, so he sent me to be a spy when I was old and accomplished enough to carry out a mission on my own. I was not famous in the Soldats, being new, and that made me useful; Schwarz didn't even think of me as coming from his opposing faction. For years, I worked under Schwarz and no one suspected the better, and I even got assigned to be the sentinel to Schwarz's facility, as you had seen my position in the cybercafe. So when Schwarz finally thought that it was time to put all of this into action, I was one of the first to know." He shrugged. "My mission was to pull you out of it as soon as I can and get you the hell out of there and out of Schwarz' grasp. Unfortunately, I was delayed because I still had to be careful that my cover was not blown, so by the time I got some alone-time with both of you, Schwarz had already been copying off a lot. And I do mean a lot."
"How much?"
He looked thoughtful. "I don't think he can create someone as lethal as Kirika as of now, because if I remember correctly, the gauge showing the progress of the copying was barely half-done when I came in. He can't produce someone as lethal as Kirika yet, but based from what was copied off from you and Kirika put together, I think he could already produce someone of your own caliber."
"And this thing has been going on for years? Since we were little?"
Akira had leaned back on his chair, looking exhausted after his long narrative. "Yes; you and Kirika are actually the last to be involved in it, although you two are the most important part of the entire scheme."
Mireille suddenly remembered something that Schwarz had said in her "dream" when he was "explaining" to them the details of his "Real-World mission" in "Switzerland": that he had long-formulated the plan of laying siege on Ramsey's fortress and that the two assassins were actually the last part of the preparation of the siege itself. Mireille shuddered as she realized what he had truly meant.
"But this doesn't expain what happened to Kirika," she remembered and said aloud. "You said that our own brain function patterns cannot be deleted or erased, and that Schwarz had not yet finished with us when you interfered, so that means he had not yet implanted any false memory chips in us because he needed us to remember ourselves while we were still plugged into Dreamscape. So why is Kirika -"
"...acting so strange? I don't know." Kinomoto looked genuinely puzzled. "I thought the machine devoted to her transfer of information must have malfunctioned when I pulled the main plug, but that wouldn't be right because her brain is still functioning all right and Schwarz's machine does not extend to anything related to individual human memory. He's only concerned with body functions. So I can't fathom why she has forgotten everything about you; only that I think it is psychological and that it's actually..." Akira furrowed his brows and tried to put it delicately, "...self-imposed."
Mireille blinked. "Self-imposed? You mean she's deliberately...forgetting me?"
"Not necessarily you," said Kinomoto hastily. "I'm sure this isn't anything personal. But the transition she must have undergone when I pulled you both out must have traumatized her and made her alter her sense of identity. That's why I had to make sure you remembered who you were when you woke up."
A bell rang at the back of Mireille's head with urgency. Yes, she remembered that transition she had to go through when Kinomoto pulled her out of Dreamscape, that sort of limbo with only bright light surrounding her, where she kept asking herself who she was. She kept remembering that she was Mireille Bouquet, assistant to a bookstore-keeper, but she knew something was missing. And just before she had awakened, she remembered that she was Noir.
Kirika, for some reason or another, had not. And everything that was related to Noir, she had forgotten in the process.
Could it be possible that Kirika wanted to be normal so much that she didn't even want to try to remember who she truly was? That she got so attached to her so-called 'dream' identity that she was going to forcefully make it a reality?
"I'm sorry, I didn't quite catch that, Ms. Bouquet." Kinomoto's voice brought her back out of her thoughts and made her realize that she had been thinking aloud. "What did you say?"
Mireille's eyes traveled to the ceiling, as if searching, for an answer before they rested back on Akira and she set her mouth in a thin, cold line. Then she gave her hair a proud, characteristically-Gallic toss. "Well, Schwarz will soon be having someone like us running around, and that is seriously going to cramp our style, at the very least. So when do we start?"
invenite, end