Chapter Sixteen

SSDF Orbital Station 002
Mars orbit

Someone had painted the world red.

He moaned, the sound barely audible over the voice of his heart pounding in his ears. Everywhere he looked -- red. It covered the ground beneath him, the sky above him. It coated his hands, viscous and cloying against his skin. It saturated his clothing, the once-fine linen now little more than blood-soaked rags hanging off his trembling body. Moisture burned his eyes, and when he wiped away his tears they were red.

Red. Red...

Everywhere he looked, everywhere his frantic gaze sought refuge. Red.

Red.

Surrounding him. Drowning him. There was only red, a never-ending sea of it, fed by an endless river that poured from the stone slab like the Nile in flood. The red inundation lapped at his knees like a hungry tongue, clung to his hands as it pulled him down.

All around him, everything he could see, touch, taste... Red.

The King's blood was red, death was red, his fear and grief and sorrow were red. Red reached for him with crocodile fangs painted with the King's blood and all was redredred...

Now and forever.

------------------------

Seto awoke with denial on his lips. He lay perfectly still, his heart pounding wildly against his ribs, as he tried to convince himself that he was in his own bed, in his quarters on Mars Station, not kneeling in a blood-soaked temple in ancient Egypt. He sucked in a deep, calming breath and struggled out of the tangle of sheets.

What... the... hell?

The cool air of the room hit him, and he shivered. His skin felt too tight for his body; it prickled with every movement, and he could still feel the cloying thickness of the blood coating it. He scrubbed at his arms, even as he pushed the thought away.

Nightmare, it was just a nightmare. He repeated the thought like a mantra. Sweat trickled down his neck as his heart rate gradually slowed. Was this what he had been dreaming about all along? Why did he remember this dream and not the others? Why was he dreaming about the death of some ancient king... and why was it affecting him like this?

And, though he wished he could deny it, it was affecting him. Strongly. As strongly as if it were a genuine memory and not simply a fantasy created by his dreaming mind. But he could still feel the blood as it soaked into the linen of his clothing, clammy and cold against his skin. He could taste the bitter, copper tang of it on his tongue. Grief still lay heavily about him, like a monstrous iron snake coiled about his heart.

He shook himself. This was ridiculous. He didn't believe in that past-life mumbo-jumbo, and even if he had, he had more important things to worry about some dead king who had probably never even existed in the first place.

Seto shuddered and forced the dream -- memory, whatever the hell it was -- into a locked box in the back of his mind, then shoved it away with all the other boxes holding his more personal nightmares. There were far too many of them, now, and some of them sprawled closer to his conscious mind, their seals cracking open. From some of them, his father's hated voice whispered promises that sent thorns twisting through his gut.

Seto didn't want to admit it, but the boxes were getting harder to contain, their locks rusting, rotting away into red dust with age and wear. He knew that he would have to deal with their contents someday, soon. But that day was not today.

Today, he had to find some way to get his Dragon back.

-------------------

The clock built into Piotr Korone's desk had just registered the time as exactly 08:00 when the office door chimed. His visitor was right on time for the meeting they had scheduled to discuss "the Seto Kaiba Problem." Korone opened the door to admit Gears, dressed in her usual work coverall, her dark hair pulled back in a low ponytail, her arms full of report pads and her omnipresent datalink.

"You're looking lovely this fine morning, Catherine," he said in greeting, and watched with delight as her face heated up.

Korone's handsomest smile broke across his face like a sunrise, warming his usually cool gaze. While it was true, as his friends liked to remind him, that he was an incorrigible flirt, he knew better than to carry his teasing too far. It was his habit to verbally prod those around him, but he was rarely deliberately cruel unless provoked. Gears had never provoked him; he just liked making her blush. He sobered and gestured to the data pads she was juggling. "Need any help with that?"

"No, thanks!" she squeaked, still flustered from his first comment, and scurried past him to the desk. Just in time, too, as the first data pad slipped from her grasp and they all spilled onto his desk in a noisy clatter of plastic on plastic.

Getting right down to business, he said, "How is Seto doing? Has he made any progress toward achieving gestalt?"

"Captain Kaiba has been using his remote," Gears reported. She sounded both surprised and relieved. "He may not like the idea that his AI needs to trust him, but he isn't fighting it."

Clearly pleased by the news, Korone grinned at her. "That calls for a celebration." He by-passed the desk in favor of the table against the far wall that held the coffee-maker. "I'll even break out the good stuff, just for you."

Soon, the smell of freshly-brewed coffee permeated the recycled air of the office. Gears took an appreciative sniff as Korone set a steaming cup on the desk in front of her.

"So, if Seto is cooperating and the 'trust values,' as you call them, are going up... What's left?" he asked, dropping into the well-broken-in chair behind the desk. He immediately leaned back and kicked both feet up to rest on one corner of the desk before taking a slow sip of his own coffee. "What else do we need to do to get him back where he belongs?"

"Captain Kaiba is making progress -- far more progress than I had hoped for, actually. But..." She chewed on her lower lip for a second. "The trust values still aren't where they need to be to achieve a successful gestalt. I don't think... I don't think this is going to be enough."

"Can't you just erase whatever caused the issue in the first place?"

"Sure, if nobody cares about losing what little unique personality Blue-Eyes actually has acquired at this stage. Of course, without at least a rudimentary identity of its own, the AI will just be a carbon copy of its pilot, reflecting his own ego back at him in an endless loop..."

"Ugh." Korone made a face that had nothing to do with the bitterness of the mouthful of black coffee he had just swallowed. "That doesn't sound very healthy. What about installing one of the back-ups, from before the triggering incident, over the current program?"

Gears looked stricken. "I thought of that, of course. But..."

"Why do I not like the sound of that 'but'?"

"The back-up files were corrupted. I don't know how it happened. I've been over everything with Duke and the crew chiefs. Duke is the one who actually discovered the problem, when he went to reboot Red-Eyes. We didn't find anything really suspicious -- It could just have been a power spike that got through the shielding or something. But both the primary back-up and the redundant copies for all the Duel Mecha are unusable."

"Which is suspicious in and of itself. A little too conveniently inconvenient." Korone frowned. No, that didn't sound good, at all. Especially when there were rumors about an infiltrator on the station. "How sure are you that this 'trust' issue is genuine and not something deliberately introduced into the system?"

"I'm certain it's genuine and that it originated with the last interface of pilot and AI in battle." Gears called up some information on her datalink and showed it to him. "As you can see here--"

"Yes, it's a very pretty graph. Nice colors," he interrupted in a lazy drawl. "But it might as well be ancient Sumerian for all I can tell. What's it mean?"

Gears narrowed her brown eyes at him. "You like to play the technophobe, but I know you can read this as well as I can, Doctor Korone."

Caught out, he shrugged and gave her a toothy, and utterly unrepentant, smile. "Okay, so I can read it. I'm still not sure exactly what it is you're trying to show me, here."

"In order to make the AI acceptable to Captain Kaiba, I had to, uh, suppress nearly every personality trait that was contrary to the captain's own. Furthermore, I had to overlay those traits that are most central to his view of himself onto the AI, rather than letting the AI develop new traits of its own. If I eliminate this 'trust issue,' all that's left is the false reflection of Captain Kaiba's personality. At that point, the synergistic connection of pilot and AI becomes moot and..."

Gears shrugged. "The AI would just be a mirror of Captain Kaiba's own mind. Easy to connect with, sure, but with no separate personality, it'd just be a form of mental masturbation. Not a gestalt."

"Seto Kaiba, squared." He gave a low whistle at the disturbing mental image that conjured up. "Scary thought. And worse than useless for piloting a mech into battle."

She nodded miserably, chewing on her lower lip as she stared at the datalink. Beside it on the desk, her untouched coffee began to grow cold as the silence stretched between them.

"I still have some of the older back-ups archived," she ventured, sounding less than enthusiastic about the idea. "There would be a non-trivial loss of function to the resultant gestalt entity, though."

"Studies have shown that the use of archived data, beyond a single iteration, can be detrimental to the pilot. The difference between what the pilot expects of the gestalt entity, and the mech's performance, and what he actually gets from it can cause not only difficulty in combat, but a significant blow to the pilot's confidence in himself and in his machine." Korone tapped his fingers on the desk. "In other words, it'd just magnify the whole trust thing, not negate it."

"There...there is one other thing I could try."

Gears hesitated, then began keying commands into her datalink. "It's risky..."

"What is?"

Still fussing with the datalink, and talking more to herself than to him, she muttered, "I can't pin down a success ratio. It depends too much on Captain Kaiba, and he never quantifies well in my equations."

Korone hid a grin at her aggrieved tone. "He never quantifies in my equations, either, Catherine."

"But--" Gears raised confused eyes up to meet Korone's mischievous gaze. She blinked at him in earnest puzzlement. "You never run probability vectors."

"I meant he's a challenge for me, too." Shaking his head, Korone snorted. Quantifying Seto Kaiba would require an entirely new branch of advanced mathematics, and a super-sized side-order of metaphysics to boot. "He rarely does what I expect him to -- even when I expect him to do the unexpected. Sometimes, I think he sees me as a bigger threat than those he confronts as the Blue-Eyes White Dragon."

"He really..." She stopped, huffed a little sigh, then finished weakly, "...doesn't like psychologists very much, does he?"

"Saying Seto Kaiba 'doesn't like psychologists' is like saying the surface of the sun is 'a little toasty,'" he said, with a grimace. "But he's a good pilot, and he's dedicated to his mission. He puts up with us because, in his eyes, we're necessary evils. He needs us to do our jobs so that he can do his."

Gears gave a distracted nod as she called up a new set of figures and graphs. Then she did a double-take as what she was seeing registered. "Uh-oh."

"'Uh-oh'?" He sat up, dropping his feet to the floor, and watched her carefully. "Is that a technical term, Doctor?"

She tapped the screen twice with her fingernail, almost as if she thought it was a stuck needle on an antiquated piece of machinery and would show the proper reading if she dislodged it. The damning readings steadfastly refused to budge. "Oh, this is bad."

"'Bad'? Define 'bad', preferably in words of one syllable or less."

"Oh, this is very bad..." She shook herself, then fixed him with a worried, pleading look. "I had no idea this would happen!"

"What? Catherine --"

"The AI..." She suddenly clutched at her head with both hands, accidentally pulling some of her hair loose from its ponytail. The mousy brown strands fell messily about her face as she slumped in her chair. "All this input from the captain... I never anticipated so much input, not from him. I thought he'd fight it, that he wouldn't open up to Blue-Eyes because..."

Gears scrubbed both palms over her face, then peeked at him through her spread fingers. "Well, because he's Captain Kaiba and he's just so... him, but he did, and I didn't think to filter for it, and now the AI is growing so quickly that unless the captain successfully gestalts within the next twenty-four hours, he will never be able to gestalt, not with this AI, and Blue-Eyes will be gone, just like Red-Eyes and, oh god, Piotr, what am I going to do?!"

"First, breathe." Korone absently patted her on the shoulder as his brain sorted out the long string of babbled explanation. "So... You're saying the Blue-Eyes AI's core personality is changing -- evolving?"

"Exactly." At his skeptical look, she added defensively, "It's natural for the AIs to evolve! They do it every time their pilots gestalt with them."

"They're being reprogrammed by their interactions with the pilots," Korone said, nodding thoughtfully. "The computer 'learns' from each gestalt, and adjusts its programming to better align with the pilot."

"That's not--" Gears started to protest, only to stop short at his up-lifted hand.

"Toh-may-toh, toh-mah-toh. Just hear me out." At Gears' tightly unhappy shrug, he continued, "The AI learns from its contact with its pilot, altering its programming to better suit the needs of its pilot and forming a rudimentary 'personality' of its own. But Seto hasn't been achieving gestalt with his mech's AI. How could it possibly be evolving?"

"It has to be the remote interface device. We've been trying so hard to get Blue-Eyes to trust Captain Kaiba enough to gestalt again that... I don't know. Maybe we, uh, overcompensated?"

Gears sighed unhappily and worried the corner of her datalink as she continued, "I guess I should have realized... The AIs are programmed to desire interaction with their designated pilots. The more advanced ones, like Blue-Eyes, not only need regular interaction with their pilots, they... crave it. Like a child who wants its parents' attention."

"Or a drug addict who needs a fix."

Gears frowned at him, but Korone didn't notice. The vein in his temple started to throb as his thoughts turned inward. He had tried to tell them. Making the AIs so dependent on their pilots... It was a disaster waiting to happen. His hand clenched around his coffee mug, but he made no move to drink. Damn it. That was why he worked so hard to draw the pilots out, to force them to connect with the real world around them rather than becoming caught up in the virtual one inside their bonds with their mecha. He had already lost one pilot, and the defeat -- and the attendant guilt of knowing he had failed to help Yami, who so desperately needed it -- still ate at him. He would be damned if he was going to lose Seto, too.

"Blue-Eyes suddenly started to get all of this attention from Captain Kaiba," Gears said, apparently deciding to ignore his last remark. "Attention it received outside of combat or training drills, and at least most of it positive, approving... Its personality started to develop faster, like a child who's finally realized the adults around him aren't going to get mad at him for being different."

"Seto Kaiba has a rather... focused outlook on things. I should've remembered that and taken it into account when I made my recommendations for the RID settings." Korone sighed and slumped back in his chair. "You know, I've been saying from the beginning that subjecting a human mind to the trauma of melding with an essentially alien consciousness over and over -- and expecting the pilots to stay sane -- is asking for trouble, but I'm beginning to think it's just as bad for the damned machines."

He shot her a narrow look, ignoring the way she bristled at his characterization of her beloved mecha. They had been through that argument often enough by now that they had reduced it to a kind of mental shorthand. "We're damned lucky we don't have a hangar full of eighty-foot tall, heavily-armed, metal psychopaths. You do realize that, right?"

Of course, he was well-aware that luck had little to do with it. Without an ounce of false modesty, he knew that his work was part of the reason none of the enhanced-mecha -- or their pilots -- had crossed that fine line between gestalt and insanity. That the Duel Mecha teams were not only sane, but fit for combat, was a testament to not only his skills, but those of Gears, Duke Devlin, and the rest of their mech/pilot support teams.

He could feel the headache starting behind his eyes. Once they had sorted out Seto's latest crisis, he promised himself he was going to head down to Mars, find some damned fun, and have it. He vaguely remembered having fun once; he was pretty sure it had been nothing like this.

"All right," he said, pinching the bridge of his nose and squeezing his eyes tightly shut. "The Blue-Eyes' personality is evolving too rapidly. That's 'bad.' Seto is unable to gestalt with the Blue-Eyes. That's also 'bad.'"

He drew in a deep breath and continued, "If Seto doesn't gestalt with the Blue-Eyes before it evolves too far away from this latest iteration without him, he won't be able to gestalt with it at all, ever, and we'll have to dump the AI, lose the current 'evolved' form of the gestalt-entity, and start from scratch. That is the double-plus-ungood, hardcore, apocalyptic 'bad' of all possible not-good things."

He moved his hand slightly, and his irritated green gaze flashed at her from between his fingers. "I don't think I like 'bad.' I think it's giving me an aneurysm."

After a long moment, he sat back with a huff. "So... What are we gonna do about it?"

"Well..." Her voice slid into an unhappy silence that trembled between them, taut as a bungee cord stretched to its limits. Korone's nerves were rapidly approaching a similar state.

"Catherine." He sat up fully and pinned her with a stern look. "Have pity, will ya? I'm a dying man, here. And you and I both know how this is going to go. Sure, we can waste twenty minutes dancing around the issue while I wish I had a bottle of aspirin," -- or bourbon -- "or we can skip straight to the part where you just tell me what you're thinking and I don't actually pound my head on the desk until I'm unconscious."

"But, I don't even know..."

"We're skipping this part, remember? Skip, skip." He made a gesture that was supposed to indicate fast-forwarding to the end of the argument, and took a final scrub at his eyes. "My usual brilliant reasoning has already convinced you that your idea has merit. So, go ahead. Spill it."

Gears tossed him a sour look that ended up a rueful grin when she saw his hang-dog expression. The man had no shame. "Okay, fine. Since you're a dying man and all, I guess it's the least I can do. Still, this is one of my more 'out there' ideas..."

"The box is only there so you'll know when you're thinking out of it," he said, with weary but sincere approval. "Go on."

"I propose to do the opposite of what I've been doing for the past two years. With this AI and this pilot, I've been forced to make the AI more and more accommodating of its pilot, for the sake of Captain Kaiba's ego. There's nothing left for the AI to give. Perhaps Captain Kaiba has matured enough to let Blue-Eyes have its own personality, instead of a watered-down copy of his own."

"It would all depend on whether or not Seto can handle a drastic change in not only the AI, but also the gestalt entity the two of them form together." Korone pondered her suggestion a moment longer, then assayed an explosive sigh. "That's risky, all right."

"Yes. We would have to monitor this gestalt extremely closely. If things go awry... We might have to sacrifice the AI in order to save Captain Kaiba's sanity."

"So it comes down to Seto. And whether or not he's mature enough to trust, not only his Dragon, but you, me..." A troubled look shadowed Korone's usually humor-filled eyes. "...And himself."

"I don't see that there's any other choice." Gears wore an equally troubled expression turning down the corners of her mouth as she toyed with the edge of her datalink. "He's got to finally let Blue-Eyes be itself, and not just a reflection of him. And he has to trust that separate personality enough to gestalt with it."

"Yeah, that's all. What the hell are we worried about?" Korone rolled his eyes. Forget Mars. When this was over, he was going to Tahiti.

-------------------------

Seto was less than thrilled to be summoned to Piotr Korone's office on the Medical ring. He scowled as he strode through the long, curving corridors. It wasn't time for his monthly psych evaluation, which was usually the only other time he was forced to darken Korone's doorstep. So, what did the 'good' doctor want with him this time? The scowl deepened as he turned over and discarded possibilities, one after the other, worrying at the problem as he walked.

It didn't help Seto's mood that he had been frustrated in his attempts to find out what Yami was up to on Mars. Something had gone wrong with the retrieval of the ferret program's data, and he had received only gibberish rather than the expected report. It was almost as if the computer running the program had self-destructed in the midst of sending the data. Had Yami spotted the piggybacked command?

Seto's hands clenched at his sides. Damn it, if Yami really had gone over to the other side, Seto would strangle his cousin with his bare hands. Somehow, though, he couldn't quite bring himself to believe that Yami would ever turn traitor. Run away from his obligations -- to Anzu, to his Duel Mech, to his duty -- yes, he had seen Yami do all those things. But turn his back on humanity? For what? Money?

Seto snorted, discarding the notion as quickly as it formed. Yami was many things, most of which made Seto want to thump him, but greedy was not one of them. Yami had all the money he would ever need, and then some. He was destined to inherit not only his father's considerable personal fortune, but Kaiba Corporation, as well, and whatever wealth would come his way from his mother's estate. While many men might not be satisfied even with such an embarrassment of riches, Seto knew that Yami cared about such things little more than Seto himself did. The money was nice -- neither of them were fools enough to believe in the false glamour of poverty -- but it was merely a means to an end, not the goal itself.

What did that leave? Power? Fame? Yami had never had to seek either, having them handed to him on silver platters right along with the spoon in his mouth and his father's favor. Seto freely admitted that he craved power. Power in any situation was security, control -- and, hell, he loved the rush, whether it was from making a killing on the stock market, crushing his opponent in a duel, soaring on his Dragon's great white wings, or unraveling an intellectual puzzle.

Today, however, was obviously not the day for solving the riddle of Yami's behavior, much less his motivation. Seto shoved that thought away, as well, and reached for the sensor beside the office door marked "Dr. Piotr Korone, Ph. D." All he had to do, he reminded himself sternly, was get this over with so that he could get back to the far more important business of recovering his link with his Dragon.

------------------

As usual, Gears was trying to explain her way around the problem rather than simply presenting it head-on. Also as usual, her habit was getting on Seto's nerves.

"I've exhausted all the possibilities, trying to come up with something to get you back in proper sync with your AI. I wish I could just wave a magic wand and make it all right, but it doesn't work like that. The RID was supposed to help elevate your pilot/AI trust values, and it has. But no one, least of all me, anticipated what else it might do..."

"You do like throwing us these curve balls, don't you, Seto?" Korone interjected, with a crooked grin for Seto and a rueful shake of his head at Gears, as he divided his attention between them. "I signed off on the RID project, too, Catherine. You don't get to keep all the blame for yourself on this one. None of us saw it coming."

"But I should have. I should have seen --"

"You're not psychic, Cath--"

"What the hell are you two talking about?" Seto demanded, out of patience with the both of them. "If the so-called 'trust' values are up, isn't that a good thing? You," he stabbed a long finger at Gears, "said it was low values in that sector that were keeping me from gestalt."

"They were!" Gears clutched her datalink in front of her chest like a shield and refused to meet his eyes.

"And you said this thing--" He started to rip the RID from the front of his uniform, then changed his mind. Instead, he covered it with his palm, pressing so hard he felt the pin-back dig into his chest. "You said the RID would solve the damn problem, not make it worse!"

Mouth pinched shut, Gears just hugged herself tighter. It was Korone who responded to the accusation. "Uh, about that. It worked a little too well, actually..."

Seto pinned them both with a glare from cool blue eyes gone suddenly glacial. "What?"

"None of us expected you to be quite so... adept at using the thing, Seto," Korone said.

Seto frowned at the use of his personal name, but let it pass. He had long ago given up getting Korone to maintain what Seto considered a suitable conversational distance. For now, Seto just wanted to know what had to be done to get him back where he belonged: with his Dragon.

"It's all my fault," Gears said, eyes teary behind the messy curtain of her hair as her chin drooped. "I adjusted the gain too high. I thought... I thought you wouldn't try very hard, and I overcompensated, and..."

"What did I say about hogging the blame?" Korone sent her a scolding look. "There's plenty to go around. After all, I'm the one who gave you the initial settings, based on my understanding of Seto's personality."

"But I agreed with your assessment. I thought Captain Kaiba would --"

"Could you both do me a favor and not talk about me as if I'm not standing right here?" Seto grated the request through clenched teeth.

"Sorry." For once, Korone actually had the grace to look abashed. "We underestimated you, Seto, and for that I apologize." His frown canted upward at the corners. "The level of emotional connection that you've managed to establish is... surprising, to say the least. I'm proud of you."

"Like I care," Seto growled. "Just tell me what all this has to do with my Dragon."

"Right." Korone exchanged a look with Gears. "Skip to the end, Catherine."

She shook her head, but at Korone's returning scowl, relented. "Okay, fine!"

"What is this, bad vaudeville?" Seto took a deep breath, touched his remote, and ruthlessly rammed down on his irritation. "Look, you called me here to tell me something. So, I would appreciate it if you two... doctors would stop dithering and just tell me what the hell is going on."

"Blue-Eyes' AI is evolving and if you don't gestalt with it within twenty-four hours, you won't be able to gestalt with this version of the AI at all, and I'll have to dump it and replace it with a back-up or maybe a new program entirely," Gears said rapidly, then tensed as if waiting for an explosion.

Seto was silent for a moment.

"All right," he said finally. "What are we going to do about it?"

"We have a plan," Korone said, smiling benignly at the two of them as he herded them toward the door. "Come on. We'll explain it to you on the way to General Anderson's office."