Still Waters Another Turn, Chapter 3
123456
If You Think I'll Give It Up, You'd Better Think Again.
123456
----
----
----
"Donner!" Director Wheeler burst into the other man's office. "Donner! What the hell have you done?!"
Donner looked at the other man with an annoyed expression. "Sit down, Director. Here, have some coffee."
"You sent my prototype out, didn't you?!"
"So what if I did?" Donner asked dangerously with an unreadable look on his face. He shuffled through some papers on his desk and finally handed a few sheets to the scientist. "Look at this."
Wheeler, always interested in any new bit of information, took the papers and scanned through them. "What is this?"
"The results of the test. The prototype was destroyed before testing was complete, but…"
"Destroyed?" Wheeler asked, his curiosity already getting the better of him.
"Freak accident, I understand," Donner replied, shrugging the question off as the other man looked more intently at the graphs and numbers on the sheet he was holding. "Nothing to do with build quality. Anyway, we weren't able to recover the prototype. When can you have another built?"
"There are three others in various states of readiness," the director answered distantly. "I see, the loss of the main balance system due to the destruction of the head caused the gyros to overcompensate…I see…," he mumbled to himself.
Donner sent the distracted man away and called in the next appointment.
----
Director Wheeler had spent the day redesigning the placement of various systems on the prototypes, and now sat down at his computer after the others had all gone. He opened up the program editor and got to work.
"Pretty soon, Rally. You won't have to wait anymore. You'll be in a new body and things can go back to the way they were…" he muttered to himself. He had spent hours after work every day for the past four years working on this. The program was incredibly complex, a marvel written with the highest high end programming engines. Some would call this sort of devotion more than a little creepy, but he didn't care. If he could bring Rally back, he would do anything.
Anything at all.
----
A couple weeks later, Max strolled through the front door of his apartment building, heading for the school. He glanced at his watch and yawned deeply; he hadn't been sleeping well lately now that the nights had started to get cold; he had to watch himself closely now to make sure he didn't start any fires in his sleep. "What a pain…" he said under his breath. Still, things could be worse. Being a teacher at Mahora wasn't that bad other than the whole waking-up-before-sunrise thing. Well, being forced to stay way too late in order to follow some weird Japanese sense of responsibility to your job aggravated him to no end, but there were ways around that too, if one were imaginative; he had become well known among the other teachers for his two hour 'visits to the post office' and patrols of the school grounds. He took a look up and down the road, and then set off in a comfortable jog toward the school.
He nodded to the regulars as he passed, gave a wave to Asuna as she went past on her daily paper route, and finally came in sight of the main road leading to the campus, though it was still several intersections away. It had been quite some time since the robot had attacked Ayaka, and things had settled down. The girl had been sneaking around quite a bit lately, however, so a lot of people were on guard because of it. As the daughter of one of the major financial backers of the school, she was a special case, and Max didn't think her parents would look kindly on their daughter getting hurt by going somewhere she shouldn't go. He had been forced to drag her out of the damaged gym building two days ago, in fact. And—
He stopped dead in his tracks as he glanced into a side road. There in the street stood two Tanaka-san robots, of the same model as the previous one. He approached warily, glad to see that no one else was out on this side street. If they proved a danger he could dispatch them fairly easily.
One of them turned around and started plodding slowly toward him. Well, that could be seen as aggressive behavior. He readied his flame.
"I see. So these two are a threat, are they?"
Max glanced to the side and saw Takahata walking out of another side street. "Yeah, they look like a threat," the fire user said.
"I'll take the right," Takahata said with a sigh.
"Got the left," Max replied.
----
"Stay away from me!" Ayaka shouted at the approaching robot. She had spotted it trudging toward her earlier, and had run off into a small side street to get away from it but had quickly become lost in this unfamiliar part of Mahora. She had run quite far, had taken many turns, but still the robot came steadily after her. She looked around for something with which to defend herself but there was nothing, not a stick or a loose pipe or anything, and she was trapped in a dead end.
She was backed into a corner, and the robot kept approaching. Twenty feet away, fifteen, ten, five. It reached down at her with massive hands and lifted her up as easily as a child, tucking her under one arm like a sack of wheat. There was a metallic smacking sound as it straightened, followed by something that sounded like someone had thrown a handful of marbles into a cookie tin.
"Wait, what are you doing?! Put me down!" the girl demanded as she squirmed, but the robot didn't react. It just stood in place, seeming to stare blankly at the wall Ayaka had been trapped against.
After a few minutes passed, she began squirming around in earnest, and found to her surprise that the robot didn't react. She pounded her fist ineffectually against the robot's arm, kicked it several times in the side, and finally tried to pry its arm up so she could get loose. Nothing worked, she didn't have enough leverage in her current position to force any sort of movement on the part of the robot, and nothing elicited any sort of response from the thing at all. After ten minutes she grew tired and stopped her efforts. 'Well, this is a fine mess,' she thought.
After a moment, Max-sensei and Takahata-sensei walked around the corner and approached.
"Hold on, Iincho, we'll get you loose."
"Don't move, Ayaka-kun. This will only take a moment."
She waited while they tried various ways to get the robot to let go, eventually settling on a loose bar from a worn section of iron fencing in front of a nearby building. With a lot of prying and a bit of pulling, they loosened the robot's grip enough to let Ayaka slip out. More than a little ruffled, she bowed politely and thanked them.
"I'll walk you back to school, Iincho," Max offered. "I'll see you in a little while, Takahata. I'll let them know you'll be late."
"Thank you."
----
"So, what happened back there?" Max asked Ayaka as they made their way to the school.
"I'm not sure…the robot picked me up and then stopped moving," Ayaka replied, not used to speaking with the PE teacher.
"Are you ok? No bruises or broken bones? Nothing like that?"
"No," she said. They walked on in silence.
"Any idea why it was after you?" the teacher asked after a moment.
Ayaka looked at the ground. "I am the daughter of the head of the Yukihiro Group," she said, as if that explained everything. It wouldn't be the first time she had been targeted; she had had to deal with things like this her whole life.
"Yukihiro Group? Never heard of it."
She looked at the American, face full of surprise. "You've never heard of the Yukihiro Group? Major financial backer of the entire school here? We have controlling interests in companies of all sorts, from computers to engineering to farming and logging operations and everything in between all around the world!"
"Controlling interests? You mean you swoop in on struggling companies, buy all their stock, and take over? Isn't that a bit cut throat?"
Ayaka straightened up imperiously and put on her best 'Class Rep' face. "That is the world of business, Max-sensei," she said haughtily.
Max shrugged it off and continued walking. "Don't you guys do any work of your own?"
Ayaka stiffened. "Of course we do. We have our own research facilities and production companies all over Japan and in America and Britain as well."
"What sorts?"
"Oh, there's the car company, the engineering departments, several factories that make computer parts, the robotics division, the videogame company, the studio and television company, even though they mostly make anime," she said the last part in a low, embarrassed tone.
"Lots of tech, there."
"Well, yes," Ayaka replied. "It is the future, and we are making our place in it."
"Kinda makes me want to ask for an application, you know?" Max stated after a moment as they rounded the last turn and saw the school grounds arrayed before them. "Or that would probably be a resume instead," Max said for lack of anything better to say.
"Y…yes."
"Well, we're here, Iincho. You're a bit late, but you're here. I've got to let 'em know Takahata will be late as well. See you in class, Iincho."
"Goodbye, Max-sensei. Thank you for helping me," she said, bowing formally again.
"Y-you're welcome." He watched her set off toward her classroom as he approached the administration building. He would never get used to all this formality…
----
Takahata inspected the small hole in the back of the robot. When Mana had called in another robot attack, he had expected to find one of the university robots that had somehow gone berserk, not three more of these. Luckily, he and Max-san had quickly subdued the two they had found, and Mana had stopped this one with a long shot from her sniper rifle. Apparently the bullet had penetrated the armor in the back and then bounced around inside, destroying important systems. He would need to get all three to Hakase as soon as possible; it looked like they would be a danger to the students, after all.
----
"Donner, I want answers."
"Director," Donner spat with excessive force, "Back off."
Director Wheeler stepped back, unused to such vehemence from the man before him.
"Here, this folder has the results from the latest test. There is also a pen drive with the video feed they sent back before they were destroyed. Get on it," Donner ordered, throwing a sealed envelope at the other man, who barely managed to catch it.
"D-Donner—"
"Shut up, and get back to work. Or we could find someone else to take over, would you like that?"
"No! You can't do that!"
"We can, and we will if you continue failing to deliver. Now get back to work."
"Yes sir," Wheeler said as he clutched the envelope, completely overwhelmed.
----
When he arrived back in his office, Wheeler opened the envelope and scanned through the reports. Heavier armor was apparently needed. Other than that, they had performed admirably in his opinion. A bit slow due to the weight, but until they could find a stronger power source…
He took out the pen drive and plugged it into his computer. He scanned through the first video in high speed up until it abruptly blacked out, then played back the last twenty seconds. He was surprised to see a gray haired man with glass and a cigarette standing in front of the robot with his hands in his pockets; he played it back several times, not understanding what had happened. One moment the man was standing there and the next, the video was over. He switched to the next one. In this one, he could at least tell what was going on. A very tall man with black hair and pale skin came running at the robot and punched it. 'That is a good way to get a broken hand,' Wheeler thought to himself.
Wait a second, what was that?
"That's…"
He played it back several times, even going frame by frame. It was impossible! "His hand is on fire…" the director said to himself, the disbelief evident on his face. It was only for an instant, but… He shuffled through the papers that made up the report until he found the one he was looking for. Apparently this unit had shut down due to overheating. Maybe it had exploded, and that was where the fire had come from…?
He looked at the time stamp on the video and matched it with the first video. Yes, there was no doubt the two robots were side by side. But his idea was obviously wrong. The robot from the first video had lurched to the side at the instant the pale man attacked the one standing beside it. The gray haired man had then glanced over with an amused look. And…yes, there was the pale man, standing at the very edge of the video, so that only his right arm was visible. No signs of burn damage or even broken skin on his hand. The gray man seemed to twitch just before the video cut off, so he played it back frame by frame like the other one, but he couldn't tell what had happened. The gray man's arm had twitched and in an instant, the video was over. It was too fast. Maybe he had a gun? But if so, who was he, and how did he have legal access to a gun in Japan? No matter. That was the domain of the police.
He started the third video, and almost choked when he saw a familiar face. "Ayaka-chan…?"