For a moment, every light in the shelter died. Haymitch gave a cry, holding onto Victoria for balance as a force field behind him dematerialized. Every door opened at once. After a moment of darkness, reddish-orange lights came on, and the voice of Silly Dilly Cartwright sounded from the intercom: "Do not be alarmed by this momentary disruption in services. Remain where you are until and unless advised to do otherwise. Services will be restored shortly..."
"Get Rosanna out of here!" Haymitch shouted to Peeta. "Vick and I are going in!"
"Holy hells," Gale said to Johanna, "they found an emergency stop... and that opens all the doors..." They looked to the yawning door of the control room. But suddenly, the doorway was not empty.
"You are getting such a whipping, boy," Ligeus Hawthorne said, twirling his belt. He halted, looking bemused as Romulus Thread pushed between them.
"Whip?" Romulus said. "You call that a whip?" He lashed the chain. "This is a whip." He threw the weighted end of the chain like a lasso, only to jerk it back as their adversary transformed.
"Now, Administrator Thread," said Snow, "you would not strike your President, would you?" It was not the hollow likeness of before, but as well-realized as the vision of someone who had met the man in person, often.
"Yes, I would have," Romulus answered. "That's why you listened to me. I gave you a plan, because I expected you to listen. Why didn't you listen to me? Can you tell me that?"
"I thought we had an agreement, not to lie to each other," Snow said. "You knew my intentions for District 12, since well before the Mockingjay affair. I chose you as the person most capable of developing an efficient plan of action. Where your plan suited my purposes, I ordered that it be followed. Where it did not, I gave my own instructions."
"You don't know that," Thread said,. "You aren't him. You are the Mutt."
"I know what you know," Snow said, "and you knew him, better than anyone. That is how I can stand before you. I have seen to the core of your psyche, and taken from it the shape of your greatest desires and greatest fears." He threw back his head and laughed, not in Snow's cultured chuckle but the cackle of a maniac or a stock super villain.
Romulus struck. The chain wrapped around Snow's neck, but he only laughed louder as Romulus convulsed with an electric shock through his own weapon. Snow gripped the chain and pulled, forcefully enough to jerk Romulus off his feet, but the old peacekeeper kept his grip on the shovel. Johanna circled and drove her chair leg into Snow's chest, juping back with a cry from a current that ran even through the plastic. "Go!" Romulus shouted. He lunged in and struck repeatedly, heedless of intensifying electric shocks, and he and the Mutt fell, shuddering with every shock. The others scrambled past, but Gale paused long enough to drive the jagged end of the chair leg into the back of Snow's neck. The Mutt jerked once, and then both went still as the current stopped.
"What is this place?" Johanna wondered. Everything was utter black, except for lights that hung in the dark. As Gale stepped in beside her, he noticed that several lights briefly darkened, as if blocked by a moving shape. Johanna reached for the nearest light, a green circle with an indecipherable symbol in the middle. She found a slightly flexible surface around it, evidently transparent. They moved further in, and quickly got a sense of a circle thirty yards wide, ringed in touch controls and screens that flared to life, each with the image of Snow.
"As you can see," said Snow, "you can do everything, and yet you can do nothing. After all, what is a raccoon to do at the controls for the engines of Paradise?" Laughter came from every direction, but one sounded different. Gale looked back, to see one screen on a pod that circled on some kind of track overhead. As he watched, the pod descended to another track at their level. "You may have sabotaged my systems and slain my Avatar, but my systems are already restoring themselves. Soon, you shall have Paradise again, and you shall be my people, and I shall be their God!"
"All right," Johanna said to Gale, "this is getting weird. Well, weird in a whole different kind of way. I'm thinking crazy weird, and it's not from copying Snow. I met him plenty of times, and not just in his controlled public appearances, and he never came within an order of magnitude of this. So where is this coming from?"
"There's something else," Gale said. "He said `I' and `my'; all the other Mutts said `we'."
"Yes," Victoria said, "that is very significant. `We' is collective or impersonal, consistent with a networked AI with neither full sentience nor autonomy. `I' implies a progression to self-awareness and individuality. But `my' is possessive, and represents an even greater step, from programmed subservience to self-interest. I believe it is possible that my previous hypothesis was not entirely correct. We were dealing with automated systems before, but now, we are facing... something else."
"Yes, I am different," Snow said as the pod circled. "I can kill you." Suddenly, the pod was behind Gale, swiveling around to reveal an iris hatch. He whirled around just in time to look down the barrel of a gun. Then he was swept off his feet, just as the gun pressed to his head. A bullet grazed his scalp and hit a force field that appeared in front of the controls. Then the pod zipped up and away, and more bullets flew, boucing off force fields that appeared in front of people and control surfaces. Finally, a field engulfed the pod, halting it in its tracks. Still, the shooting continued, as bullets bounced between the field and the shell of the pod, until ricochets started ringing inside the pod itself. The gunfire stopped, the field disappeared, and the pod descended to the floor.
Johanna knelt at Gale's side, and then looked at his feet. There was a chain wrapped around his ankles that trailed back to the door, where Romulus Thread was on hands and knees. "Not balanced," he said. "But... I did something."
"You already did enough," Gale answered.
Victoria and Haymitch were peering through the iris of the pod. Inside, a tall but slender body was curled up. She pulled off the helmet, reveling an elfin face with a dusky complexion and wide, slanted eyes. As they watched, the head tilted with one last breath, and then dropped. "This is one of the Ancients," she said. "No remains or visual records were ever found, but a thousand years of tradition has given us an entirely consistent description. The only inconsistency is that most descriptions portray them as very light in complexion, but that can be harmonized as variation within their stock."
"But who is he?" Gale said as he lurched over. "What was he doing, and what happened?"
"For all we know, it is a she," Victoria said. "Descriptions of the Ancients indicate that it was quite difficult to tell. In any event, the sequence of events is clear enough: This individual was ensconced here in the control room, and tried to kill us when we entered. But the security systems deployed force fields to protect us and the equipment, ultimately deflecting the gunfire back to its source. Clearly, whatever role the individual fulfilled did not include for or direct control over the facility's major systems. Beyond that, who `he' was and how he came to be here, we can only conjecture. The possibilities range from a great scientist overseeing a final experiment to an inmate who took over the asylum."
"You're right, there is no way to know," Johanna said, "I read about psychiatry once. It got awfully hard to tell the cures for crazy from the disease."
The iris closed, and the pod moved to the center of the track. It stopped over something like a pedestal, and rotated to turn the iris downward. There was a sound of the iris opening, followed by a pneumatic "shunk". Then the open iris came up again, revealing an empty interior.
The faces of Dilly Cartwright and President Snow appeared on the screens, smiling. "A problem in management transition has been resolved," Snow said. "All services will resume under new management."
Dilly said: "To complete this transition, please enter the pod."