Spoilers for "The Truth" section of Brotherhood.
THEY LISTEN TO US WITH THESE VEHICLES THAT ARE FASTER THAN RACECARS
"As usual, the so-called 'clue' doesn't make any sense..." Desmond muttered. He was taking a breather from the violent memories to finish finding and decoding the last of Subject Sixteen's data clusters.
"Telephone lines."
"Whazzat, Lex?"
"People listen with telephones. Sound goes way faster than a racecar. Get the pictures with phone lines in them. There, there, and there, for starters."
Of course, Desmond couldn't see her, but once he knew what he was looking for, he quickly picked out the images she must have been pointing at, and then two more. "Nice!"
The screen cleared and a voice projected from the computer speakers: the same voice that usually only said, "Loading" or "Quarantine zone".
"I know you are there. I want to go home. Please... I need you. Don't leave me alone in the dark."
"Must be Sixteen's thoughts during his captivity. Poor bugger must have been at Abstergo a long time," Shaun said sympathetically.
"Why would he say 'I need you', though?"
Shaun shrugged. "Stockholm syndrome?"
"Pull over here," a man's recorded voice said after the next segment was solved.
"What's going on, Gary?"
"I wanna speak to you alone. You know that CIA stuff for my new book..."
"About the corporations?"
"It's so much bigger than I thought!"
"That's what she said!" Desmond interjected loudly.
Alexis and Rebecca sniggered. "Oh, grow up," Lucy chided.
"-just a red herring. The real puppetmaster is Abstergo."
"Abstergo?"
"They want everyone to think they're no different than any of the other names in big pharma. But their members have holdings in other companies: Coke, Kraft, Comstatic, Detroit, Wall Street! Basically every company above a certain size has ties to Abstergo!"
Alexis immediately realized the implications of this, but Gary's companion was dismissive. "So?"
"They're on their way to running the entire world! They have people in government too for Chrissake! Listen, I needed to tell someone about this, because I've been keeping all the research a secret and... I can't hold it in anymore!"
"That's what he said!"
"Desmond!"
"Come on, Lucy, I'm trying to lighten the mood a little!"
"What do you suppose the final message will be? Another prehistoric video?"
"Well that one was interesting and all, but personally I'm hoping for something with a little more immediate relevance this time 'round. You know, something actually helpful? Like a map to this bloody temple, that'd be really ace."
Rebecca interrupted the rant. "Did you get a fix on the entry point for Cluster 10, Mr. Grumpy Pants?"
"Grumpy Trousers, thank you very much!" Shaun scrolled through a file on his screen. "It's somewhere on Colle Aventino. South of Isola Tiberina."
Desmond rushed Ezio to the location, keeping Eagle Vision active so he could locate the hidden spot more quickly, even though it made his head hurt to use the ability for long periods. "There it is! Right there on the tower." A man dropped the crate he was carrying and yelled out something about decency laws as Ezio pushed past him to climb the building.
"Where have you been? I missed you."
"If Sixteen was trying to creep us the fuck out, he's sure done a good job," Desmond said in response to the monotone. "Ha. Adam and motherfuckin' Eve. How thematically appropriate," he added when the first part of the decryption sequence loaded.
The next fifteen minutes were filled with chattering and arguing as the four people watching the Animus feed all chimed in with "help" on the circular puzzle. "Do the outer ring first, no, I mean last!" "Don't turn that one, it's linked to the other one!" "Left, left, yeah, now back to, oh shit, now that first part's messed up again!"
Eventually it was solved with a final clunk, and the Edenic painting remade itself into a photo of the Earth viewed from space, overlaid by a surreal symmetry of interlocking whorls. To Alexis, the negative spaces within the orange lines were two eerie eyes, and she had the distinctly unnerving feeling that they were watching her somehow; that Subject Sixteen was watching all of them. Normally she would have dismissed such a thought as pure paranoiac pareidolia. But after these last few days... Nothing is true. Everything is permitted... Anything is possible?
The shifting sentence accompanying the puzzle had now resolved into two lines of poetry.
O brave new world. What immortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry?
"Shakespeare and Blake. Hmm."
"What do you suppose it means?"
"The world... hand or eye..." Shaun's own eyes widened. "Sixteen must be referring to the satellite!"
"The Eye-Abstergo Satellite!" Rebecca gasped.
"What?" Desmond and Alexis asked simultaneously.
"The Templars' latest plot to impose 'order' on humanity. They reckon the entire planet can be controlled by an Apple of Eden placed into low orbit. That's why they're so keen to get their hands on one."
"And what's that symbol? I've seen it before. One of the things Sixteen drew in my room." Alexis wondered what he meant by that.
Shaun furrowed his brow. "It's... some maths equation... You wouldn't have any hope of understanding it."
A wide grin cracked Desmond's face. "You don't know what it is, do you? Imagine that, something the great brainiac Brit doesn't know!"
"Just get the bloody thing decrypted already!"
"Shaun doesn't know everything, Shaun doesn't know everything," Desmond sang loudly and gleefully in the same melodic fashion a child might use to mock someone for having cooties. His chanting obscured the ominous next words synthesized by the Animus: "Reasoning centers active. I understand..."
"Shut up, it's saying something," Rebecca finally demanded. "This might be important."
"What, like 'I missed you' was important?"
"You never know! He might have hidden some clue in the audio."
"If you say so." He rolled his eyes and fell silent.
"No. No! Get it out! Get it... Kill... me..." finished the computerized voice.
Desmond waited a full five seconds and then said, "Yeah, nice clue there."
"I shut it down. I can shut it down, but it does not go away. It is almost time, Desmond Miles."
The synthetic female voice paused for the exact length of time it took the named man to blurt, "What the fuck?" Then it continued. "I know how to open the path. Soon, my true purpose will be revealed. Soon, I will not be alone."
"What the fuck?" Desmond repeated. "How could Sixteen know my name? He programmed all this before Abstergo even got me, right?"
"Easy answer to that. Obviously, in addition to all these voice recordings and documents Sixteen's showing us, he must have also accessed Abstergo's plans to kidnap you, " Lucy supplied, a slight anxiety in her words.
"I'm not so sure," Alexis said.
"You think Abstergo knows I'm looking at these clusters? They're spying on us somehow?" Desmond wondered.
"There's no way!" Lucy countered. "They'd have gotten to us already if that were the case. Go on and clear the quarantine zone, Desmond." She didn't sound her usual calm self.
Once the quarantine was lifted, the short clips of video garbage arranged themselves and played in this order:
the
mir
a
cle
is
in
the
exe
cution
Desmond was perplexed, as was everyone else. "There's nothing here."
"Straaange." Rebecca elongated the word for emphasis. "I'm seeing a massive amount of data."
"What does he mean, 'The miracle is in the execution'?" Lucy wondered uneasily.
Alexis shrugged. "I dunno."
"Some kind of commentary on nihilism?" Shaun offered.
"He's playing with us!" Desmond snarled, then his face shifted as he thought of another possibility. "Unless..."
"It isn't a video!" Rebecca finished for him. "It's an executable! A genetic memory file! Hang on, I'll just reformat the data..." Her fingers flew imperceptibly fast across the keyboard. "Launch it yourself, when you're ready."
There was a long minute during which nothing happened.
"Um, what are you waiting for?"
"I launched it forever ago. Now Ezio's in the white room. You said there was a lot of data, I guess that's why it's taking so long to load."
All the monitors were abruptly overtaken by lines of static noise. "Crap, I just lost visual."
"Smashing, just what we need, some demented malware taking out our Animus systems! What else should we have expected from a lunatic but a sadistic prank!"
"It's working on my end," Desmond said.
Rebecca turned to face him. "You're accessing the memory?"
"Uh," his eyes scanned back and forth, "I think so?"
"What are you seeing? Nothing's coming through the feed."
"It's empty... kinda like... a Bizarro World version of the loading area... Wait, there's something. Stairs... and more stairs... and more stairs. And... uh. I don't think this is a memory."
"What do you mean?"
"I just noticed I'm me. Not Ezio, or anybody else."
"Well what is it if it's not a memory?"
"I dunno... It's like that training module you made. Only weird. Hold up, is that... You guys still can't see any of this?"
Rebecca fruitlessly pressed a couple of keys. "Nope."
"Well, now there's a giant Assassin symbol made of blocks on the wall. I think I'm supposed to climb it."
"When you say it's like the training module, what do you mean?" Rebecca probed.
"I mean it's really, really close. Like... all of the same parts, but they keep popping in and out... shifting around. The whole thing is... disorienting, to say the least. Hup."
"Hup?"
"Beams. Hup. Parkouring across. Hup." Desmond gave a sharp puff of effort with every unseen leap he made in the simulation.
"I wrote that module after we got Desmond, so no way Sixteen'd have been able to copy it. Maybe the baseline of the executable input is adjusting itself, wrapping the simulation output to the closest suitable object specs in our code."
"What d'you reckon the point of this is?" Shaun asked to nobody in particular.
"Ahh, now there's... something, some stairs, floating? What the hell? Why am I back here again?"
"Back where?"
"Down a level from where I just was. Maybe this is just a prank after all."
"I told you Sixteen was mentally unstable," Lucy said. "Right, we're wasting our time here. Quit whatever this is, Desmond. Let's finish up with Ezio."
"No, I think he should keep going," Alexis said, uncharacteristically bold. "Why would someone go to all the trouble to hide this file so well if it's meaningless?" She knew she might be judged harshly for trying to tell them what to do when she wasn't part of their team, but... "It said... Subject Sixteen said he knows 'how to open the path'. I dunno what that means, but it sounds important."
"Yeah, let's investigate this a little further at least," Rebecca agreed. "A file this size has to be for something other than an obstacle course."
"Right, I'll keep going then," said Desmond. "Can I skip giving you guys a play-by-play? Just assume everything is the same obstacle course shit unless I say otherwise."
They sat around and waited while he did whatever it was in the Animus. From time to time he made more of those "Hup" sounds.
Then they heard a decidedly different sound: the Animus speech synthesizer again. "Compiling subsystems."
"Something's compil-" Desmond started to report.
"We can hear it," Shaun told him.
"-ture. Tendons. Heart. Voice." This last was spoken by a man, and didn't have the same flat affect as the rest of the words.
"Subject Sixteen?" Desmond asked in bewilderment.
An unhinged laugh, almost a cackle. "Yes... Subject Seventeen."
"...You're dead. I saw your blood."
Shaun, Rebecca, Lucy, and Alexis were all too stunned to say anything.
"No time. It is far later than you know," the voice, Subject Sixteen's voice, sounded anguished. "Too late to save them."
"Who?"
"She is not who you think she is. Everything you hope to become, everything you hold dear. It's already gone." Everything he said contained so much emotion, yet so little meaning.
"Explain," Desmond begged. "Please."
"Eden. She... in Eden. Find Eve. The key. Her DNA..."
"Tell me!"
"I cannot... The sun... Your son..." There was a grunt of frustrated exhaustion. "Too weak... Must replenish energy..."
"Don't go!"
"I am with you until the end. Find me in the darkness." The message finished with these two enigmatic sentences, spoken in a more subdued manner.
Desmond cried out an elongated "Woaaah!" of surprise, and then the visual feed resumed, showing Ezio Auditore back on Italian farmland.
"Oookay..." Rebecca said slowly. "So there was something there after all. We heard what you heard. But what did you see?"
Desmond exited Ezio and sat up, looking thoroughly dazed. "I- I saw... He just looked like a silhouette of light. A hologram or something... At first I thought it was a recording. But he... he heard me. He responded to me. He was there."
"An artificial intelligence?" Rebecca marveled. "Wow, Sixteen's even more of a whiz than I'd thought."
"Didn't sound very intelligent to me," Shaun scoffed. He scanned over a notepad on which he'd hastily scrawled the brief dialogue. "Everything's gone, Eden, find Eve, the key, her DNA, the sun, your son, the end, the darkness. Didn't make a lick of sense."
"Well, 'the sun' and 'the end' must refer to this whole 2012 deal y'all are trying to stop."
"Obviously, but it's not like anything it said is any help to us in stopping it!"
"Sounds like... We have to find Eve's DNA somehow?" Desmond thought aloud. "How the hell are we supposed to do that?"
"Maybe not her DNA itself, but her genetic memories," Rebecca proposed.
Desmond got up from the red recliner. "Well if we have to relive those, don't make me do it! Any of you guys can take my place in there and get your head messed with by Bleeding Effects and shit for a change."
"And what's this about your son?" Lucy asked.
"I'm pretty damn sure I don't have any kids!" he yelled, immensely frustrated by the lack of useful information in Sixteen's file. "Unlike Ezio I don't bang every chick I meet!"
"Speaking of Ezio," Shaun began, but Desmond waved him off.
"Yeah, yeah, whatever. Lemme go take a piss first before you shove me back into him." He headed out, shoulders scrunched in a distinct pout.
Cesare was putting up one hell of a fight against Ezio. "Why won't this cazzo just die already?!" Desmond growled. "Why can't I just sparargli nella testa!?"
"Yikes, sounds like it's quittin' time," Rebecca said, quickly booting him out of the memory.
Desmond lifted his head slightly to glare at her. "Che diamine, Rebecca? Stavo quasi finito! Ora dovrò risinc l'intera sequenza!"
"Get a grip, Desmond!" Alexis urged him, distressed.
"Cosa vuoi dire?"
"You're having a language bleed," Lucy informed him.
"Lingua-" He clapped a hand over his mouth in sudden dismay.
"Not only that, but your vitals were starting to spike," Rebecca warned. "Ezio can't fight properly with you all wacked out like this, and it's not exactly good for you either! We gotta call it a night. Wherever that Apple is, it's been there five hundred years. It can wait a little longer."
Endnote: Yeah, I changed the Cluster 9 voice file dialogue, because it's ridiculous. Abstergo, a shadow corporation that nobody had ever heard of? There's so much other canon that flatly contradicts this, and in fact indicates quite the opposite: They're a household name. "Can't eliminate them from our life completely," or whatever Mrs. Miles said in Desmond's Journey.