On the other side of the door was a multi-level expanse the size of a large warehouse. Crypto and Revenant stood on an upper perimeter floor composed of metal grating. At the far end was a staircase which led to the ground level below. The floor and walls were smooth, polished concrete, which radiated cold energy. The sophisticated technology housed in the vast space below were arranged into blocks based on function- Crypto recognized gene sequencers, microscopes, and cold storage units, among other pieces of equipment that he wasn't familiar with. Finished clones lay unconscious in long rows of crude cots. In one block of factory space, relatively close by, robots were cutting into the new clones to attach cybernetics and replicate old scars.
The hacker saw his own unconscious body lying on a table, while a robot drilled into his skull. He squeezed his eyes tightly shut and looked away.
When he opened them again, he was looking up towards the ceiling.
Surveillance cameras- there were a lot of them. Interestingly, the cameras in this facility were never angled to view the doors… Whoever was monitoring the place must be concerned that the vast supply of automated equipment was running smoothly, rather than looking for intruders. He wasn't sure where he was, geographically. Perhaps the building was in a remote location that only those unmanned drop ships could get in and out of.
He remembered the mini-computer in his pocket that helped competitors in the Apex Games to navigate the arena, and brought it out, wondering if it would be functional now that it wasn't being heated by the Ring.
No signal.
Figured- these things only worked in the Apex Arena. Crypto sighed and slipped it back into his pocket.
Back to the issue of the surveillance cameras. There were too many, positioned in too many places throughout the warehouse, to disable with the drone and pass through undetected. He could set off an EMP - permanently disable some of the cameras, possibly cause a power surge that would disable the entire surveillance network - but that would give away the fact that someone was in here who shouldn't be.
As he looked up at the ceiling, trying to think of a better option, he paid attention to the wires, conduits, and electrical cables. He could identify those that connected the cameras to their network, their power supply… It gave him an idea.
He turned his focus to the array of equipment on the ground floor, trying not to let his eyes linger over the disturbing abundance of clones. What he was interested in was computer equipment- more specifically, the bundled cables that connected to them. He followed those cables along the wall, up to the ceiling, and noted the direction in which they traveled.
That was where he needed to go. It would lead him to the servers, from which he could hopefully get into the system at the corporation's headquarters and find out where they had taken Mila.
He turned to tell Revenant what was on his mind, only to find that the assassin was no longer beside him.
"Revenant! Dodaeche mwoya?" The hacker's voice came out in a harsh whisper.
He looked around frantically, and hoped to whatever force kept the universe going that the volatile simulacrum hadn't run off to destroy anything or murder anyone. Either would undoubtedly alert the corporation to their presence in this facility. No, that couldn't happen now… Not when he was right here, closer to finding his sister than he had ever been.
"Revenant!"
Crypto checked the status of his commlink, and found that it was offline. He let out a frustrated sigh. Those, too, must only work in the arena.
A flash of movement on the ceiling caught his eye, and drew his attention to it. Revenant had scaled the wall, and was now making his way between the cameras. He kept his body pressed flat against the ceiling as only his limbs moved, with as little vertical motion as possible- it kept him out of line of sight of the cameras, and made him surprisingly difficult to notice among the pipes and wires.
A trained assassin knew how to move undetected, and Revenant had been designed and built with the function in mind.
"Where are you going?" Crypto hissed.
He didn't get a response.
Revenant reached a point where a large number of wires and cables intersected. He seized the cluster of wires in one of his clawed hands. To Crypto's surprise, he didn't immediately rip them apart.
That same red energy that the hacker had seen him generate before, that crackled and spread in tendrils like lightning, pulsed from Revenant's core through his arm. It reached his hand and dispersed into the wiring. The cameras powered down.
The assassin dropped from the ceiling and landed between the rows of equipment with only a soft clack. He rose to his full height and motioned for Crypto to catch up to him. A quick scan by the hacker's drone showed that the camera system had been powered down, and would need to be rebooted to come back online. That gave them five, maybe ten minutes at most to get out of line of sight.
Crypto vaulted over the railing and dropped down to the ground floor. His boots made a thud as he hit the ground, immediately extending his arm and rolling along his shoulder to disperse the force of the impact- his movement wasn't as stealthy as the hulking, killer robot's, and that was unsettling.
Who was so determined to design the perfect killing machine? That thought flashed through his mind as he made his way across the warehouse floor. He looked up at the ceiling, following the cables that would lead him to the server room.
"This way," he called out as loud as he dared. He carefully stepped around one of the robots working in the facility- true to Revenant's word, it did not react to his presence.
"Door five, over there."
Revenant was first to make it across the floor. To Crypto's surprise, rather than rush in alone, the simulacrum waited for him to catch up and swipe his key card.
"Whatever you did to the cameras - and the drop ship - can't deactivate these locks?" Crypto asked once they were both safely through the door.
Revenant ignored him.
"How does it work?"
Again the assassin refused to acknowledge him. Crypto was tired of his attitude, and feeling a lot less afraid of death than he'd ever felt before, after all the horrors he'd endured today. As Revenant continued down the corridor, Crypto sprinted to catch up, then reached out and grabbed him by the upper arm.
"I asked you a question. Don't walk away from me."
In a single smooth motion, Revenant spun around and caught Crypto's wrist in his opposite hand. Red energy pulsed once again from the simulacrum's core to his hand, where its tendrils dispersed into Crypto's forearm. Against his will, the hacker's grip on Revenant went slack. He could no longer feel his arm- it was as though a dead thing hung from his elbow, a limp, useless hand at the end of it.
"What the hell?"
"Positronic charge," said Revenant. His tone was uncharacteristically calm- this was a mundane occurrence to him, not nearly as interesting as the spilling of blood.
"Temporarily removes electrical energy from a localized area. You'll be fine in a few minutes- unless you get in my way again."
Crypto raised his eyebrows. "That's how you hacked into my unhackable laptop!"
"Huh. For a self-proclaimed genius, you sure are slow." Revenant ended his sentence with a sarcastic laugh.
Unlike an electromagnetic pulse, which worked by overloading a circuit and destroying its transistors, a positronic charge simply neutralized the electricity within the circuit. That much basic information, Crypto understood- beyond that, the physics involved was more Wattson's area of expertise than his own.
"But you can't do it all the time," the hacker said out loud as the thought occurred to him. "That's why you needed my help to break into this facility. It must require an enormous amount of energy."
Revenant turned away, and continued on his path down the corridor.
"Of all the deaths I've endured, depleting my power core is one of the easier ways to go," he said without looking back. A death without a human equivalent- that was the best he could hope for, if hope was within his range of emotions.
"So don't get the idea in your pathetic, human brain that you are worth anything to me."
Crypto remained silent. His left hand was clenched around his numb right arm, trying to rub some life back into it. He sped his walk to a brisk pace and passed Revenant, not caring that his shoulder brushed the assassin- no matter how threatening Revenant's voice may sound, Crypto doubted that the simulacrum would kill him as long as his existence continued to be convenient.
"This way," the hacker snarled in a quiet voice with a fierce tone.
The hallway terminated at a 'T,' and he followed the layout of wires and cables to the right. At the end was an unmarked door- heavy-duty steel, one that the corporation clearly didn't want unauthorized personnel to get through. Crypto swiped his keycard, and the thick door unlocked to grant them access.
A wave of cold air breezed over him as he pushed it open. The room beyond was dark, illuminated only by thin strip lights that marked aisles on the floor. It had a distinct smell of hot plastic and metal. Electronics emitted a steady, low hum. Occasionally a red or green light from one of the machines would flash.
The door shut and locked behind them with a click. Rather than search the numerous rows of computer equipment on foot, Crypto activated his drone and piloted it up and down the aisles. His maneuvering was clunky- feeling had returned to his thumb and index finger, but the outside of his hand and forearm still felt like it had fallen asleep. Revenant made this task much harder than it needed to be, the hacker thought with displeasure.
He found the maintenance terminal, disengaged from the drone, and walked toward it.
"Don't break anything in here," he muttered to Revenant as they made their way through the rows of computer equipment. The assassin made a noise in his vocal processor that sounded like a scoff. If one of them would be clumsy enough to bump into something, surely it would be the human- flawed and weak as those disgusting human bodies were…
Crypto was first to reach the terminal. He powered the computer on. When it requested a password, his drone established a wireless uplink with the computer and allowed him to bypass the login screen. He'd mitigated the need to try running all the passwords that the corporation had used previously or combinations of input that followed a similar pattern- even with the drone's ability to run through them rapidly, it would be too slow on this computer, which was only meant for doing system maintenance. The corporation, predictably, didn't care too much about the time or comfort of their maintenance workers.
He ran a search, focusing on data that he could access from this computer, without the need to remotely hack into another machine. If he could find what he needed that way, it would be the fastest.
The first thing to catch his eye were personnel files- for the corporation's employees, but more notably, for the contestants of the Apex Games. He already knew what was in his own- it was a profile he'd uploaded into their system, a competitor named Hyeon Kim. Four-time champion of the Undercard Games… When Mila had been kidnapped, when he'd been forced to make himself disappear, he'd constructed the false identity to bypass the Undercard and hide out here, in the Apex Games.
He looked over his shoulder. Revenant was facing away from him, watching in the direction of the door. The assassin's sharp claws extended from the ends of his fingers and clicked against the side of his leg- ready to kill. He paid no mind to what Crypto was doing, perhaps having decided that it served his own best interest to let the hacker work in peace.
Crypto opened Revenant's personnel file.
He wasn't sure what he'd expected to see. Schematics, maybe; a list of confirmed kills… Certainly not the grisly image of a long-dead human head and exposed spinal cord suspended in a jar, tubes and wires coming out of it. That was on the first page of the file that had opened, along with a photo of a sandy-haired young man with a burgundy vest and a cold, empty stare.
Revenant was the first of his kind- the first sentient machine.
It - he - had been achieved by putting a human brain in suspended animation, feeding oxygen and nutrients into it long after the body it had come from had died. The brain was interfaced with an artificial neural network, a computer processor that had the ability to learn… The human consciousness was used as a starting frame of reference from which the learning computer came to understand emotion, opinion, itself as an entity.
As it continued to learn, it seemed, the consciousness of the machine had eventually surpassed the need for a human brain. It had its own unique emotions, sensations, logic patterns and world-view. The human consciousness, trying desperately to make sense of this new reality in a metal body, was interfering with the thoughts and feelings of the independently sentient machine.
Revenant had been right all along- he had a separate human consciousness living inside his programming like some kind of organic computer virus, distorting his own thoughts and forcing him to feel alien sensations that didn't belong to him.
Crypto quickly closed the file.
A mixture of complicated emotions swirled around in his stomach. Anger on Revenant's behalf, that the corporation would do something so atrocious… He'd witnessed their evil up close, had everything important in his life taken away by it, and here was the empirical proof that he wasn't the first. He wasn't the only one. This had been going on for nearly three hundred years.
And yet, the evil of the corporation didn't change the evil of Revenant himself. No matter what had been done to him, it didn't change the fact that he existed for the sole purpose of ending human life- that he liked his function, and saw to it that everyone around him was always as terrified and miserable as possible. He shouldn't have been made to suffer at the hands of whoever led the corporation hundreds of years ago, but neither should so many people in those past hundreds of years have been made to suffer at the hands of Revenant.
The hacker opened Gibraltar's personnel file instead. He read through it as quickly as he could, and with wide eyes.
"They had the funding to his family's search-and-rescue group cut," he said in a shocked voice barely above a whisper. "The corporation cut their funding so he'd be forced to enter the Games to keep it going."
Was everyone in the Apex Games here because the corporation had somehow forced them to be?
Crypto minimized the file, and opened Bangalore's. She'd served as a soldier for a military force owned by the IMC, who'd chosen to leave her stranded in the Outlands, forcing her to fight in the Games to earn enough money to return home. Mirage was in desperate need of money to care for his ailing mother, who'd sustained a brain injury while working for Hammond Robotics. Caustic… The Syndicate was protecting him from law enforcement, in exchange for the profits they gained from his research- research that he was testing in the Apex Games, using the other competitors as guinea pigs.
"Ileon sesange! How have I been such an idiot?"
Human arrogance - the need to feel special, the sense that everything happening to him was so uniquely unfair - had gotten the best of his rational mind. He'd been convinced that he was the only person whose life the corporation had destroyed, while the other Legends enjoyed a life of luxury as celebrities funded by its wealth. In fact, they were victims of its corrupt workings too, and had been for even longer than Mila or himself.
His outcry got Revenant's attention. The orange glow of those optics stood out in the darkened room as the simulacrum turned to face him.
"You're going to have to be more specific, skinbag. You were an idiot today, yesterday, last week…"
Crypto didn't bother to answer, which prompted the assassin to look over his shoulder and find out what he was so absorbed in. Lifeline's file was open, revealing that her parents were wealthy executives of the corporation, and were making efforts to have her removed from the Apex Games to a cushy office job. She was against such a perfect, worthless life, and it seemed that the Syndicate officers who managed the Games were on her side. She was far too profitable to the corporation among the Legends, so they protected her from her parents' influence. She was a team leader in the volunteer medical corps, working to undo a little bit of the harm that her parents and the corporation had caused to so many people. Her winnings from the Games supplied funding for the wide array of resources that such an endeavor demanded.
None of that was of any interest to Revenant. He had exactly one thing on his mind.
"Do you have my syncording data?"
Crypto shook his head.
"Revenant, I- I don't think that altering your syncording data can help you."
He spoke in a soft voice, the tone of which demonstrated real distress at what he had learned about his teammate. He pulled Revenant's personnel file back up and stepped away from the terminal. The simulacrum took his place.
The change in Revenant's posture revealed the moment at which he comprehended the pertinent information. The tension around him seemed tangible. He let out an enraged snarl. His right hand retracted and gave way to the crude, stabbing weapon that Crypto had seen too many times in the arena today. The assassin pulled his arm and his entire right side back, poised to strike the computer terminal, to tear it apart for somehow acting against him. As his arm cut through the air, he seemed to realize that the terminal may still prove useful- destroying it right now wasn't the most intelligent option. Instead, he turned the violence on himself, carving a deep, jagged gouge in his own chest.
Warnings cut through his vision, followed by static; streams of broken, meaningless data alerting him to the damage. That was how a machine sensed injury. He focused on it, and refused to acknowledge the human sensations of flesh tearing, warm blood flowing from the wound, the blade scraping against bone that didn't really exist. He refused to believe that this human iteration of himself existed.
His next assault was directed at the floor beneath his feet. The smooth tile broke apart and crumbled under his impact. A cloud of fine dust disrupted the order and cleanliness of the neat rows around him.
"I. Don't. Want. This!"
An ear-splitting shriek from his vocal processor, shortly after which he stabbed his arm deeply enough into the floor that it took noticeable effort to dislodge. The assassin collapsed in the pile of rubble he'd created. His systems vented air noisily as his body struggled to maintain its ideal operating temperature- the pulverized tile and concrete he'd introduced into the air didn't help him, particularly after carving a hole in his own chassis.
He didn't care.
He'd lived too long with an intruder inside him, forcing him to experience someone else's sensations, memories, deaths as his own. And he would never truly die, never fade to the peace and oblivion of endless nothingness- for all that he'd endured, he wasn't even allowed that comfort, that certainty to take him from this miserable life with enough patience. This was the closest he'd ever come to finding a solution - to freeing himself from the human monster that invaded him - only to find that he was further away than ever before.
His monster was more than just a mistake in the syncording data that was used to carry his consciousness from body to body. The monster had existed before him- had been used to create him.
Crypto watched the simulacrum's display of rage silently. He kept a safe distance and waited.
"I know you don't," he said softly once Revenant had stopped moving. He wasn't certain that the assassin could hear him over the hiss of venting air.
Crypto figured that he could safely return to the terminal without getting stabbed, so he stepped over the broken tiles and resumed his position. He closed the personnel files, not having found one on Mila. That was a good sign, in a way- it meant that she wasn't in the Undercard games.
It also meant that he'd have to dig deeper to find her location. Buildings owned by the corporation, and their floor plans, was next on his agenda. He'd compile a list of the locations where they were most likely to be holding her, and… go from there.
"This doesn't have to be over," he said as he worked. "I have contacts who do cybernetic augmentations on the black market- they'd know more about the technology of interfacing a human brain with a machine. Maybe they can help."
It was a reach, and he knew it. Still, he felt that he had to do something. In this moment, as depraved as Revenant may have been, the corporation was much worse. Revenant was an ally against them.
"I don't want or need your help," the assassin growled. He forced the venting of air from his body to slow and quiet as he stood, towering over the hacker. Having made his point, he backed off.
"I understand," Crypto answered. He pulled up a file containing information on properties that the corporation currently owned.
"Maybe you can help me with this instead," he said as he stepped back, allowing Revenant to see the screen. "You said before that you knew the Syndicate's operations- that you could find my sister before I do, if you wanted to."
The hacker's left hand clenched into a fist inside his pocket as he thought about that conversation. Revenant had threatened his family, and that angered him like nothing else. He was confident now that the simulacrum had no interest in harming Mila, though- she was of no concern to him, a victim of the corporation just like the two of them, and Crypto hadn't turned against him. Threatening her back in the Games to get Crypto on his side, albeit unwillingly, had made strategic sense from where the assassin stood. Killing her now would not- a waste of effort and resources for no gain.
Revenant stepped over to the terminal and glanced over the list of properties. Crypto wondered, hopefully, if the assassin knew the answer he needed- and would give it to him.
Before he had the chance to find out, an alarm blared in the hallway outside. The white lights along the floor turned off, and were replaced a moment later by red. Revenant stepped away from the computer, toward the door.
"Someone knows we're here."