38. A Better Son/Daughter - Rilo Kiley
"Father, please," Noah begged. "Please don't -"
Gozaburo checked the notes attached to his flipchart and consulted one of the technicians. Peering down at him as though pressed against the other side of the giant glass screen, and not just a pixelated image cast upon it, Noah watched in growing horror as his own father gave orders for parts of his programme to be deleted.
"Please don't do this to me," Noah implored, grabbing hold of his memories and trying to keep them together as they dissolved in his hands. Everything in the virtual world was a visual representation of simple computer tasks, to make Noah's human consciousness feel more at ease.
Never before had he felt less at ease; or less like a human being.
"You'll thank me for this," Gozaburo said crisply. "I'm simply streamlining you, to make you better."
"Better at what?" Noah cried. He'd never used this sort of tone before; not with his father. Gozaburo demanded ultimate respect, not whining and pleading. Even as a toddler Noah had adjusted his own tie and sat with his hands primly in his lap. "You're deleting me."
"I have a much more important job for you than just languishing here doing nothing."
"Father!" Noah screamed, feeling memories of his mother begin to fragment. He didn't have very many of her, since she died when he was still very small. Taking them away seemed crueller than anything he could ever be thankful for.
"Start uploading the link to the mainframe," Gozaburo said to a technician. "Remember to put the limiters on him. He's only to have control of Duel Monsters programmes, with priority to Seto's training curriculum."
"F-Father?" Noah whispered. Seto was the boy who'd been brought here after Noah had his accident, though originally he'd been intended as Noah's competitor, to sharpen his ruthlessness so he could one day inherit Kaiba Corp and run it in just the same way as his father. "I'm you're son," he said desperately.
"And you're going to help your brother. I know you don't like him, Noah, and what better opponent could he have than someone who wants nothing more than to beat him?"
"But I don't -"
"Turn off his voice capacity. I have a meeting with Industrial Illusions at three, and I need to be able to concentrate if we're going to finish before then."
Noah wasn't even allowed to scream as all his humanity was deleted, save for his hatred of Seto, and he was uploaded into the system as nothing more than a file marked 'first draft'.