Morality in Question
Final chapter
By the HamsterofDeath
Morality in Question, Chapter 6
Vash pieced it together while the shuttle became a tiny spot in the sky. Why did he not see it sooner? He had let his guard down once; just once, because he had thought Knives would insist on doing everything by himself.
He tore his eyes away from the sky and looked at his feet. He felt his shoulders sag from the crushing weight of guilt, shame and defeat as he was forced to watch yet another person be taken away from him.
Knives and Milly were standing near the campfire, a distance away from where the shuttle used to be. Knives observed his brother's reaction before his eyes darted to the chessboard. He smiled in satisfaction. Despite being so close to victory, Vash never got the opportunity to take Knives' queen and win the game.
"There was something you didn't tell us?" asked Milly.
"Indeed there was. Meryl is now on her way to a ship that is orbiting around the sun. Once there, she will receive instructions on what to do next."
She looked at him, confused. "Why didn't you go with her?"
"Because I can do nothing up there. I need Meryl to do it."
"Do you need someone small?" Milly's question was not really serious, but she didn't know what else to ask.
He smiled. "In a sense, I did."
"You are very confusing, Mr. Millions."
"Let me simplify it for you. This isn't the first time I do this."
Meryl was staring at the screen. Time flew by, as fast as she did. The sky turned from blue to black. Eventually, the music stopped, and a beep announced a new message.
"Dear Meryl, if you can read this, it means everything went exactly according to my plan. I am sorry for not telling you this little detail, but it was necessary to let everything take its course. None of us remembers this, but we already went to the ship. You and me. Unfortunately, Vash sabotaged the ship, it broke apart, and...
You died."
Meryl's eyes became huge.
"Vash didn't intend for that to happen, the ship should just not have started and we would have missed the window, but he made a mistake. You were sucked into space and then burned up while falling back down. I was able to catapult myself into the general direction of the Auriga – that's the SEEDS ships' name – and an autonomous drone picked me up. I didn't know about these, I would have missed the ship otherwise..."
Meryl tried to regain her composure, but she couldn't shake away her disbelief and shock.
"Anyway, once on board, I found the computer. It was still running, as expected. What you do not know is the kind of message I sent back. Once on board, in science laboratory 5, you will find a chair with a helmet and a bunch of cables attached to it. You will sit down in it. More detailed instructions will follow later."
Milly listened to Knives as if he just revealed to her that she was, in fact, a Thomas hybrid of some sort.
"You... you received a message from the future?"
"Yes. The SEEDS researchers experimented on me," he answered with a hint of disgust. "They strapped me to a chair, switched a machine on, and I felt memories being stored in my head. My own memories, from a previous timeline."
At that moment, Vash arrived. He looked at his brother with hard eyes. "You knew it would happen. You knew all of it. You already did all of this."
Knives smirked. "Ah, so you finally pieced it together. You were faster than last time. It was because of the merchants, wasn't it?"
Vash nodded sternly. If Knives knew about them, what they would do, he could set things up and then just let the events unfold. He could use the knowledge from the previous timeline.
"Don't you think this is a perfect end to our story, Vash? We both are letting the one we trust do the right thing: flip the switch and go one way or the other."
Meryl read the messages a few times. What did she just read?
"In the original timeline, the SEEDS engineers used the entanglement machine on humans. It was a failure. So, they chose our kind as their new laboratory rats. Tesla was the first free born plant to be experimented on. I will spare you the gruesome details, but what was done to her made her hate everyone around her, which is understandable. She tried to send all the ships into the sun, but was stopped. Sounds familiar? Well, she did what she did, and things happened similar to this time. Eventually, she made it to the SEEDS, just like you are doing now. There was no Vash to stop her. She used the computer to send a message back to the past, pretending that everything was fine and that the experiment was successful."
I am Meryl 2.
"At first, I did not know exactly what happened. In the second timeline, the scientist that received her message was convinced it was a good idea to use a young boy – me – on the receiving end. They connected me every day for a few months. My previous self eventually figured out why. They were hoping for a new message from the future. They calibrated the whole system to fit to my brain, but no message ever came. I, or my former self, used every chance he got to find out more about this experiment. As it turned out, Tesla died in the second timeline before I was born – she must have changed something by accident and was vivisected. I was used as her replacement. As she did before, I attempted to send the ships into the sun, but I did the very same mistakes as she did and it failed. We must have been very similar."
I am Meryl 3.
"So, in the second timeline, things happened almost as they did now, with a few small differences. I reached the Auriga and connected myself to the chair. I tried to send my memories back, so that I would not repeat my mistakes. But it failed. The data of a plant brain is too voluminous for an efficient transfer. I have only a few key memories from the second timeline. Ideally, I would have sent a copy of everything back, but well, I guess that was too much to ask."
Mental Knives had figured it out when he finished reading.
'He is asking you to go back into his younger body. Your mind isn't as complex. It requires less data. He wants you to copy yourself into the next Knives. The Knives from this timeline has memories of the previous timeline. He replicated everything to reach this point again.'
A new message popped up. It contained a detailed description of how to reach the lab, how to activate the computer, all necessary passwords.
"And to answer your last question, the plant Vash brought was poisonous. I told Milly it would be a spice, she tried it, it tasted awful - so none of you ever ate it. I excused myself and said I must have confused it with a similar looking one. The poison caused her to pass out at exactly the right moment. I knew she would be safe, so I know you will forgive me."
She gaped at that bold assumption. "How could you, you jerk!" And he played the innocent part so well that she had found herself doubting poor Vash!
Then a last sentence appeared.
"You are the most powerful human in history. Make the right choices."
Meryl sat frozen for a while. Saying that she was angry would be an understatement. Her emotions were a mess and her mind went into 4 directions at once.
"Ok, stay calm," she said in a trembling voice. "Analyze. He wouldn't just sacrifice you."
Mental Knives saw the chaos in Meryl's head and wanted to help her organize it. "Let's go through it all."
He sent me up here. He sent me with no possible escape. I either do what he wants, or die! And if I die, he will just try again in 3 years. If I succeed, he wins. He used me. I was manipulated all the time.
She wanted to cry, to scream. She had put her faith in him. She had cared about him and his plan. She had been ready to die for a lie. He was going to receive all the information he needed to obliterate humanity.
"What is his motive?" asked mental Knives.
Why did he do this? I do not understand. This doesn't make sense at all. Why didn't he just crash all the ships the second time he had the chance?
"These assumptions are wrong. It does make sense."
How can you know that?
"Knives is a rational being. We can run through his thoughts, now that we know about the previous timelines. We can reverse engineer why he did what he did."
He is an evil bastard. He just used us all to get what he wanted.
"No. You could decide to ruin his plan forever by crashing the ship into the SEEDS. You know enough about the controls by now to make small adjustments at the last moment. It's possible. Even if you just give it a nudge, Knives would never find the ship again."
But I would die.
"If you chose to do so, yes. If Knives is truly evil, he will not care about your death, only about his ruined plan. Would he take that risk?"
No, I suppose he would not.
"We know his goal. We know he wants to send you back in time. Do you think he would have preferred to come with you to make sure everything goes according to his plan? Do you think he would have sent you alone, despite that reducing the chance of success, if he had a choice?"
Meryl calmed down a bit. The argument was correct. No matter which scenario she assumed, Knives coming along was always what he should prefer.
So he wanted to come, but couldn't. But he knew what would happen. Why didn't he change it?
"It is Knives we are talking about here. We have to assume this is well planned. If you know what is going to happen, that is a huge advantage, but you can only use it once. As soon as you make a change, everything can change. He followed the events he knew from the previous timeline and only deviated at the very end to stay in control."
So... that means...
Meryl's mood changed. From infuriated, she went to neutral. Then, she even smiled a bit.
He trusts me to understand his plan. He did not tell me anything because he couldn't. I would have acted differently, which would have been a risk.
"I think so, too. He cannot greatly underestimate you by mistake, he analyzed you too much for that. He will not assume that you blindly follow orders. So he probably predicted something along the lines of what you would think right now."
He trusts me enough to take the risk of sending me alone.
"I think so, too."
He has confidence in my abilities to overcome this.
"And more."
If he sends my mind back, instead of his own, that means my memories will have a big impact on the past Knives.
"Well, we cannot know how exactly it will play out, but yes, what the next Knives will do will largely depend on you, your memories, your personality, the way you think... you might make him a wiser person."
Will I be a voice in his head?
"Impossible to know. Something like this has never been done."
Meryl looked out of the window that started to show cracks. She was locked to her seat, but was still clinging to a piece of metal that was attached to the wall of the shuttle with her hands just in case it wouldn't be enough.
The planet slowly became smaller and smaller.
Let's do this.
The end.