Chapter 7: Reason for treason
Xemnas' office was placed one floor above the dormitory level and it took a good fourty minutes for Axel to bring Roxas the distance, mostly due to the blond refusing Axel's offer to carry him.
They still managed to get there in time, though.
As they entered, the man who'd called for them came forward to give Roxas a hand in getting over to one of the two armchairs placed on the visitor's side of the big oak desk at the centre of the room.
Axel sat himself down in the remaining armchair, seemingly relaxed and comfortable, while Xemnas took place behind the desk.
The leader of the organization was a very charismatic man, with olive skin and ivory coloured hair reaching down to his shoulders. His golden eyes sparkled with vitality and curiosity as he watched the two visitors.
"Now," he said slowly, his voice filling the big dusky room as if he'd had a hidden microphone on him and speakers placed out along the walls, "I want to know everything about this matter: How it happened to begin with, how you, Axel, managed to work it out and find Roxas, and what you did to bring him back. It's important that we find out what exactly it was that Diz did and what he could possibly have gained by doing it."
Axel nodded his understanding and Roxas simply imitated his move, hoping it would be the right thing to do.
Xemnas turned to Roxas.
"Let's start with you, then. Do you remember anything of what happened when you..." Xemnas paused in order to find a good word for what he wanted to say. "...fell asleep?"
Roxas closed his eyes in deep thought.
"I remember having talked to Axel about Diz acting funny around me..." he started and paused for a moment in a try to gather his thoughts. "After that, I believe I went ahead to go inform you, sir, about it, since Axel had advised me to do so."
Axel nodded his confirmation on this when Xemnas looked at him.
"But then... I didn't get here, did I?" Roxas asked hesitatingly.
Xemnas shook his head.
"No, you didn't."
Roxas thought about this for a moment before he continued.
"I remember meeting Diz in the corridor by the archives... He told me he had to do something... He needed me to do something of great importance for the war of light and dark – or something like that. It's all fuzzy and messed up to me, but he somehow got behind me and said I'd be sleeping for a while and wake up in the morning when everything would be alright."
Roxas looked at Axel for support and got a smile in reward.
Xemnas seemed to consider what Roxas had told him as he sat in silence for a moment, his eyes focusing on a spot somewhere beyond the room they were in.
"Axel," he then said and Axel had to think for a brief minute about how to put what he knew into words.
"Hrm. As you already know, I found Roxas on the floor in my room the same day that Diz sort of disappeared."
Xemnas nodded and Axel went on.
"About eleven months after that, I happened to run into a strain of coding that didn't look quite right. I was trying to find a virus in the city network system and that's where I found it, more or less by a mere coincidence. I checked it's source and after some time of research, one month later I managed to find a program of sorts hidden within the our own security system. What broke the lock was a mere toying with plausible aliases and passwords for someone wanting to oppose or challenge us. I simply tried out every enemy name I knew from our history. It took about another month and a half to finally get it right though."
"What was it?" Xemnas asked impatiently.
"The alias was a coded name translating to 'heartless/nobody' and the password, hold on to something now, was 'Ansem'."
Xemnas' eyes widened and he took a deep breath.
Roxas realised that the name for some reason rang a bell in his still somewhat fuzzy memory.
"Once I got in," Axel continued, "I found a whole world, a sort of digitally created alternate reality, circling around the birthplace and surroundings of the home of the last keyholder: Sora."
Axel made another pause to let it all sink in before he continued.
"I had some trouble realising what it was that I'd discovered, but it still took about six months to break up the coding into more exact information and then three more months to figure out the purpose of all the characters involved. It was only about two days ago that I finally managed to find a code in the system that wasn't like the others: a protective unit in the shape of a Trojan virus with a life of its own. This protective unit had the shape of none other than Riku, another codecracker we've had in our crew and a friend to Sora."
Xemnas made another wide-eyed face.
"The dark key?"
Axel nodded.
"The very person. Or at least, a string of his memories encoded to be attached to the named protective unit."
Roxas once more saw the image of a silver-haired guy standing in an inferno of flames.
Riku... The name made a resonance somewhere deep within his heart and Roxas felt a sudden urge to scream out loud as the information of his memories rushed over him without making any sense. But he kept quiet and tried his best not to let his inner turmoil show in his face as he focused on what Axel was talking about in a try to calm down.
"Anyhow, this Riku-code encircled and sort of 'protected' a particular string of ever shifting code. Once I managed to put things together I almost locked it this morning, lost it in the last moment only to find it again and finally enclose it within a code-trap."
Another pause. Xemnas nodded for Axel to continue.
"That was when I got certain that I'd actually found what turned out to be Roxas' mind. I drew it back out from the coding by wiring Roxas to the machinery of mind-messing stuff down in the lab, you know the VR-stuff, but before that, I created a character code of my own in order to go in there and guide him in the right direction. After that was done, I had to undo the protecting 'Riku'-code in order to get to what in this world was shaped as Sora, namely Roxas' mind. Once I'd guided him in the right direction I only had to sit back and wait to see if it all had worked."
Xemnas hummed and looked at Roxas in deep thought.
"That ever shifting code string", he said after another silent minute had gone by, "it was disguised as Sora, you said?"
Axel nodded.
"Yes, it had his appearance and from what I can understand, for some reason it enclosed a massive amount of data, very much similar to that of the memory bank collected by the Neurologically Altered Memory Input or Neutralisation Experiment".
Xemnas raised his eyebrows at this, his eyes suddenly seeming bigger as the surprise was growing obvious in his face.
"The NAMINÉ?" he said with a slight doubt in his voice. "I thought that program was deleted years ago, after that mishap of memory replacement failure."
Axel nodded again.
"I thought so too, until just recently when I found its material being used in this fake world."
Roxas was staring out into the air as he tried to grasp the information thrown at him.
Sora, Naminé, Riku, Ansem – All names belonging to the history of the organization, made into actual people and memories in his own mind by the simple use of hypnosis and a VR-input... One question kept circling around his thoughts of confusion: Why?
Xemnas laid his forehead into a set of deep wrinkles as he tried to figure out what all of this meant and Axel waited patiently for him to ask another question, the one question he knew that all three of them had been thinking during the main part of this meeting, and the one question he still hadn't found an answer to.
"I wonder..." Xemnas mumbled and let his eyes fall once more on Roxas. "What could possibly be the reason to all this?" he went on and started to move his fingers slowly up and down on the polished black surface of his desk, creating a drumming sound that echoed in the tense silence of the room.
"Why go through the trouble of breaking into our system without taking it out completely, create a digital version of an AU and put in strictly forbidden and in some cases dangerous data, just to hide the mind of one person? Why do all this, when he could have just killed him straight off or ruined our entire system?"
Axel looked over at Roxas and noticed a sudden paleness in his friend's features. He felt a sting in his chest at the thought of what could have happened and thanked the fates that Roxas was still alive.
"Maybe," Roxas said in thought as he was starting to get all the pieces of the puzzle together, "maybe he wanted me alive, needed me for something later on and figured he'd simply put me away for safe keeping in a way that both kept you busy looking for me and in the same time served as a way for me to somehow learn about whatever it was that this Sora-guy had that made him special".
Xemnas and Axel both looked at him as if they'd had an simultaneous epiphany.
"Of course..." Axel mumbled.
"The code keys... within the memory bank..." Xemnas continued.
"It could only be un-locked by someone resembling Sora enough to be able to adapt to his line of thinking without losing himself in the process..." Axel cut in.
All of a sudden, Roxas got a clear image of a group of islands in a tropical climate and a huge white coloured and silver ornamented portal with locked doors and a huge silvery key with a golden grip. There was a dark voice, someone who had whispered something in his ear as he'd fallen asleep.
"This world has been connected..." Roxas mumbled as he started to truly understand the meaning of what he was seeing. "It's a riddled code... 'one who understands nothing, knows nothing'... it's a riddle!"
Axel and Xemnas looked at him in utter curiosity as he had said this out loud.
"A riddle for what?" Axel asked, confused and a little worried that his friend had gone a bit crazy after all.
"The key to the world! He wanted me to enter the Kingdom Heart!"