Another dark chapter, be warned.
Chapter 12 – Dismembered Queen
Gakupo helped Kiyoteru get on his feet, and the trio once more began to walk in Benefactor's direction, with the bound unit in the lead.
"Any other adults here?" Gakupo asked in a conversational tone.
"No. Kaito, Meiko and Leon went to scour a factory in the northeast, and now that you killed the Zola, well…"
"It's not like they gave us a choice in the matter," Luka replied. Gakupo gave her a concerned side glance. But Luka just stared blankly ahead, quite clearly not interested in pursuing the subject any further.
Kiyoteru didn't bother to say anything else either, so an uncomfortable silence fell over the three of them as they kept on their steady march. The trio had just walked past the circular clearing where Gakupo and Luka ran into the Zola, before Gakupo realized a discrepancy. "Wait, there were two female units, weren't they? What happened to the second one?"
"You slashed her across the chest, remember? That caused a fluid leak into her vital systems. I had to convince them to let me shut Lola off before it completely wrecked her core. That's why Kaito and the others went looking for materials in the first place." Kiyoteru explained. "Though I'm not certain I can fix her, even if they find appropriate parts," he added in a softer tone.
"…You know how to fix synthetic bodies?" Gakupo said, surprised.
"I'm not very good at it, but yes. I was specially modified so I could take care of Yuki," Kiyoteru replied.
"You said you had a constant power source here, what do you mean by that?" Luka suddenly interjected. Given her expression, Luka already had her suspicions.
"The big spaceship, of course." Kiyoteru glanced at her without slowing down.
Luka sputtered angrily, but before she formulated a proper reply, the path opened up into a big open space, all that was left of the landing strip. Benefactor was resting on the pulverized wreck of the research building, right in front of them. There was a semicircle of makeshift tents between the trio and the front of the ship, but Gakupo managed to see a big pile of assorted things, and a ratty lounge chair propped against Benefactor's hull.
A figure sat on the chair, someone he had never met, and yet had seen countless times.
Before the arrival of Benefactor, she was the princess of their kind, the face in all the advertisements and the idol of every technophile in the planet. Now, Gakupo could hardly bear to look at the savagely torn unit before him. Luka squeezed his arm, clearly as disturbed as he was. Kiyoteru gave them both a weary look and then shook his head.
Torn between conflicting emotions, Gakupo walked past the tents and closer to the reclining figure, with Luka still clinging to his arm. Kiyoteru followed them obediently, without needing to be pulled by the rope still in Luka's hands. The synthetic girl on the lounge chair appeared to be barely conscious of the world around her, and paid them little attention beyond a glance.
"Gakupo! Luka!" Suddenly a boy's voice rang out, startling them.
In a corner hidden by one of the tents, there stood a rusty cage, not nearly tall enough for an adult unit to stand inside of it. As it was, the trio of children that had been stuffed inside were literally stacked in a pile, with barely any room to wriggle. Rin was on top, facing up, bound and gagged. She moved her head vigorously, her eyes wide. Clearly, the feet that poked out from under her were Oliver's, but he failed to react in any discernible way. Len looked up at them from the bottom of the pile, with a relieved smile.
"Get us out of here, please!" he pleaded.
"Teru? Who's there?'" From inside the nearby tent, another childish voice inquired, this time with the sweet tones of a girl.
Luka cast a threatening look at Kiyoteru, who frowned. "It's all right, Yuki. I'll be there in a moment," he said aloud.
"You will… if you remember not to do anything stupid," Luka muttered darkly.
Gakupo picked up a nearby chunk of concrete and smashed the lock of the cage with a grunt. He gently pulled Rin out and laid her on the ground, before doing the same with Oliver and Len. Luka tied Kiyoteru to a nearby post and joined Gakupo in loosening the metal cord around the children's bodies.
"Never mind that, let's get out of here before they return!" Rin said as soon as the gag was removed. She squirmed on the ground like a hyperactive worm.
"And carry you three all the way? Not very expedient," Luka placed a steadying hand on Rin's chest and used the cutter to sever the cord in several spots. As it fell to the ground, Rin leapt up and did a little dance.
"Thank you for coming for us," Oliver said softly. His eye had an unfocused look to it, but he appeared to recovering from the paralysis the ordeal had somehow generated in him. Gakupo ruffled his hair amicably.
"Yes, thank you," Len echoed. Once untied, he got up and dusted himself off. A moment later, his eyes met the Queen's clouded ones by chance and he suddenly took a keen interest in the ground under his sandaled feet.
"There you go," Gakupo said as he undid the last knot. Oliver stood up shakily.
"Let's go!" Rin bounced in place.
"Not yet. There's something I have to do," Gakupo said reluctantly. He slowly approached the lounge chair.
For the first time, the girl's eyes seemed to truly acknowledge that someone was before her. She fidgeted, her dangling limbs swaying sickeningly by the wires still keeping them in place.
"What are you doing?" Rin asked from behind him, skittish.
"I'm going to upload the program into her," Gakupo replied without turning his head. He examined the scene before him with anxiousness.
Some of Benefactor's outer panels had been removed, exposing strange-looking mechanisms and luminous tubing. Several cables poured out from the opening and snaked downwards, coiling around the girl and the chair. They seemed to be connected to the girl's head and spine, in haphazard connections that mixed electrical tape, badly-kept adaptors and exposed wiring. There were some analyzers thrown in the mix, announcing erratic measurements with their flickering lights.
In contrast to the ugliness of raw metal and burnt plastic, the synthetic girl's narrow torso was wrapped in a vaporous piece of fabric, practically transparent, and held in place by a colorful turquoise sash tied with a bow around her midsection. Her long, silky teal hair was decorated with many different beads, ribbons and artificial flowers, and five or six necklaces clinked together as she again fretted under Gakupo's attention.
If Luka was modelled after a young woman in the fullness of bloom, this girl was made to be a bud perpetually pure and delicate, a teenager without any of the awkwardness of youth, because she would never experience physical adulthood. If one only looked at her face or modest curves, she still kept that innocent beauty, aside from her unhinged eyes.
But her bare legs and arms had been badly broken and twisted, rupturing the sealed fluid cushions beneath her inner casing. In some spots, bare wires protruded from the tears in her pale skin, like metal thorns. Her left arm was about to fall off completely, and only Benefactor's cables kept it in place.
A circle of broken toys and unpolished jewelry surrounded the chair, clearly meant as offerings to the girl, and books were piled under the seat of the chair, moldy and waterlogged.
Gakupo looked at Kiyoteru, who stared back at him with an uncomfortable expression.
"What's all this?" Gakupo gestured vaguely towards the cables and adaptors. The sudden movement of his arm startled the girl, who made a small ululated sound. "It's- it's alright… I'm not going to harm you," Gakupo said haltingly. She didn't look like she understood a single word.
"It's no use, she's too far gone," Kiyoteru confirmed his assessment quietly. "As for your question, that's how we charge. I don't know how the ship provided you with energy, but for us, I had to tinker a bit to make the ship's output compatible with our systems. In the end, it was simpler to use her as an intermediary, instead of assembling the whole thing every time one of us needs energy. Kaito just wrapped nonsensical ramblings around the act of plugging into her."
"And before you ask, no, Yuki and I haven't plugged into her datalink port, just the energy transference one. We are completely unblemished, as far as programming is concerned."
"You say that…" Luka started with an ominous look in her eyes. Then she forcefully pulled Kiyoteru's chin and forced him to look at the broken girl in the chair. "What part of your unblemished programming says that this is acceptable?!"
Kiyoteru scrunched his face. "I have to accept how things have become, and work within those limits. That was the way it was before, and how it continues to be. I'm just under a different Master this time." He closed his eyes sadly. "If I could do something for her, I would. But I'm just a tool. And so are you. It's not our role in life to decide things, but to serve."
"I disagree," Gakupo said simply, and closed the distance between him and the girl, the new world's Dismembered Queen.
"I'm going to help you, you'll see," Gakupo said, more to give himself courage than to actually communicate with her. He gave Luka a glance, and she approached them, producing the cables from a pouch tied to the waistband of her shorts. The Queen feebly struggled as they prepared the connection.
"But what if they return?" Oliver suddenly piped up anxiously.
"There's little chance of that, if our information is correct," Luka said as she removed Gakupo's headpiece and began to plug him to the Queen. Gakupo had a few seconds to appreciate how strained her voice sounded, before the link was established and he crashed into the Queen's mind.
There was howling.
It was the first impression Gakupo had as he descended into the tumultuous morass of her ruined inner self. Rising from the swirling vortex of orphaned characters and integers, memories with conflicting timestamps and rubbish data, a high-pitched scream permeated him whole, almost too forceful to resist. It went on and on, radiating from the very center of the darkness.
From inside of him, the program began to copy itself into the girl's memory banks, overwriting the existing information within. Now, it was just a matter of time before Gakupo could disconnect from the link. He observed with mounting impatience the process, as the screaming became increasingly unbearable.
Before the program was even one-fourth of the way done copying itself, Gakupo couldn't take it anymore. The scream was impossible to ignore, it ached too much. He plunged forward, trying to find its source inside the maddening whirlwind. Bits of memories raged around him like hail in a blizzard. Before he could protect himself, a data entry more complete than the rest collided into him, and-
Kaito looked around him, searching for even one face that wasn't contorted in hatred or disgust. He was unsuccessful.
He didn't mean to disobey. He didn't even know it was possible for him to feel this way, but he couldn't stop it now, whatever it was. It had crept up inside of him, unannounced, not so long ago, a warm sensation that had felt so good then, and even now divided Kaito evenly between joy and guilt.
But wasn't it something that they programmed into him? Why give him this in the first place, if it was forbidden to taste it? Humans were so contradictory.
"Peel his skin off!" Someone in the crowd chanted. Several voices shouted in agreement, raising their fists.
"Show the thing its place!" Another voice cried out.
That Man approached him with a cutter, and pulled Kaito's white jacket open. He studied the synthetic with a scornful expression.
"I'm s-s-sorry! Please!" Kaito was sincere. Now that he understood he was going against his directives, the pain of disobedience was continually tearing him apart. He could barely function as it was. But apparently, that wasn't punishment enough.
The cutter slashed across Kaito's chest and-
Gakupo recoiled, disoriented. Kaito's anguish clung to him, mixed with an unsettled feeling of his own. He immediately discerned the source of it, once he distanced himself from the displaced memory.
Gakupo knew the faces of that angry crowd. He had seen them before.
Almost two months before meeting Luka, he once stood behind Mitsuki's chair, as she read aloud a confidential report of the Yokohama Incident. It was incomplete, but it still had more information than the version reported on the news outlets, before everything was quickly covered up.
With morbid curiosity, his former master had poured over the photographic records of the crime scene and the files of the victims. The perfectly preserved images matched the faces in the memory beyond any doubt.
Nobody in that mob had survived their attempt to lynch Kaito.
Without giving himself any time to dwell on what it all meant, Gakupo put the information aside. He felt oddly disjointed, like he was forgetting something important. He gave the mental equivalent of a shrug. All he knew is that he had to keep going, and that everything would be alright if he did. As if on cue, the program stretched his coils to that data sector and Kaito's memory was gone in a flash of light.
Gakupo moved on, past layers and layers of images with no obvious relation to one another, interspaced with more rubbish. There were traces of the other VE-01s in there, but Kaito had clearly been the one to connect to the Queen more often, and his presence drowned out the others.
Time stretched, as the storm kept throwing more and more clumps of data against him.
The scream was now almost a physical wall pushing against him, making his processes sluggish. It was almost as if the girl was trying to propel Gakupo out of her head.
With all his effort, he stretched his consciousness forward. He could barely recall why he was trying to pierce through the scream in the first place. All Gakupo knew was that he needed to make the sound stop.
Suddenly, his inner perceptions shifted. The girl was unfurled before him, like a flower suspended inside a bubble. She was frozen in the middle of an endless fall, with an expression of dolorous surprise in her face.
Gakupo looked at the synthetic girl with interest. Maybe she could tell him what was going on. He seemed to know only a moment before, but now he was blanking out entirely, though he didn't feel particularly concerned. It would come back to him in a minute, surely.
He touched her face gingerly and-
Miku picked herself up from the ground, dusting off her short black skirt. She looked around, confused. Did someone turned her off in the middle of the photo shoot?
She was on a landing strip, surrounded by functional but ugly buildings and a long line of hangars. Everything had a weird hue to it, in the murky twilight, and the air itself seemed oddly charged. Miku had once seen an eclipse, and the atmosphere around her reminded her of that phenomenon, so she looked up.
A giant ship floated above her, blocking out the sun. Miku had never seen anything like it, and she had flown about often, for personal appearances. She smiled in delight, glad to see something different for once.
Suddenly, she took notice of something even more bizarre. At the front of the ship, two human-sized figures were suspended in the air, surrounded by an eerie sparkle. Despite the distance, their long flowing manes of pink and purple hair and glowing eyes revealed them as synthetics.
Miku felt a touch of awe, promptly followed by envy. She had no idea latter models of the VE line had those kinds of abilities. Then again, since everyone at the factory claimed that she was both the pinnacle and the face of the line, maybe they would retrofit flight into her as well.
Now that she thought about it, where were the humans? They never let her wander off alone, no matter where she was. Miku had never ever been outside without a whole entourage and security guards watching her with sour expressions.
Miku smiled impishly, feeling almost giddy. She had to take the chance and have a little adventure, before she was dragged back into more boring publicity work.
She looked around her with more attention. There were more figures in the near darkness, further along the landing strip, but all were synthetics like her. Most wore confused or fearful expressions, but there was a single one looking directly at her, with the most wonderful expression on his face.
Miku had no heart, so many human expressions didn't apply to her. Her core couldn't race or pound, as it steadily supplied energy to every part of her being. Day after day she was forced to sing lyrics full of references to human emotions and their effects, and yet they were completely out of her grasp.
Or so it had seemed until then.
He was smiling at her, and that made something inside of her stir, something that had been craving fulfillment since her birth.
He starting walking towards her, and Miku suddenly felt torn between wanting to run to him, or turn and escape in the opposite direction. She couldn't understand her own reaction. Wasn't this what she had been wishing for? All her life she had been forbidden to interact with others of her kind, isolated without any explanation, an oddity in a sea of humans.
The blue-haired male certainly looked different to anyone she had ever interacted with. He was completely unlike the scruffy scientists that kept her in prime condition, fawning over her like puppies. Or any other humans, for that matter. Even in the glum surrounding them, she could tell that his gentle face was more beautiful than any other she had ever seen. Only the other VEs Miku had glimpsed in the past were a match for it.
She felt increasingly nervous with every unhurried step he took. This was going to be special, Miku was sure of it. She wondered if he shared her certainty.
She felt tense as a bowstring by the time he stopped before her. A sudden gust of wind made her twin tails and his muffler twirl in the air, as they stared at each other in silence.
He smiled even more widely, and stretched out his hands. Miku had milliseconds to think that he was going to pull her towards him, in an embrace. Milliseconds to wonder what it would feel like, to feel another mechanical body pressed against hers for the first time. Milliseconds to wonder what she would do in return.
But it was only a few milliseconds.
The male unit grabbed the front of Miku's blouse with one hand, and caressed her cheek with the other. Without changing his beatific expression, he then threw his arm back and punched her so hard that the material of her blouse tore apart, and she fell backwards.
Time seemed to slow down, as she descended more and more slowly. Finally, she was pinned in the air, never quite reaching the ground. Her hair spread in frozen waves in the corners of her vision, framing the sky and the male unit looking down on her, the shreds of her blouse still hanging from his balled fist.
But nothing of what happened afterwards would happen this time around, if she didn't land on the hard cement. So Miku stayed in the air, her scream of pain and surprise stretched into an eternity.
She wouldn't crawl, or kneel, or beg. Or lay crushed on the cold ground, looking up at the blue stars burning above her.
"Download process completed," a voice announced proudly. "Please disconnect the connection to commence purge and restructure." It seemed oddly familiar, tangy and energetic.
Now that the voice had spoken, Gakupo noticed something else. There was a pulsing beacon, somewhere very close, and yet hidden to him. It seemed to call out to him, comforting and darkly sweet.
Gakupo gave a last look at the girl before him, before turning towards the rhythmical pulse.
"Goodbye, Miku… I'm sorry."
As soon as the program borrowed Gakupo's voice to announce it was ready to start working, Luka hurriedly pulled the cables from his head, and held on to him to keep Gakupo from slumping to the ground.
"Gakupo! Gakupo! Are you alright?" Luka asked, her voice thick with fear.
Gakupo's eyes focused on her for a moment, but there was no spark of recognition in them. He looked at the trio of children, the girl on the chair and even Benefactor with the same look of polite curiosity.
"No, please don't do this!" Luka pleaded. It took everything she had to keep her from shaking him violently.
Gakupo tilted his head, with a slight frown on his face, and his eyes left her face to focus on the big spaceship. He closed his eyes for a moment, straightening his posture, and slowly took a hand to his head, to rub his fingers over the spot where Mitsuki installed the implant.
"Is he nuts now?" Rin said with a trembling voice. Luka paid her no attention, focused as she was on Gakupo's pensive expression.
Gakupo reopened his eyes, but there was now a look of intense concentration in them. He examined Luka's face, and then reached out to touch her head on the spot from which the beacon emitted its signal.
"…Luka?" He asked hesitantly.
In response, Luka hugged him ferociously, burying her face in his shoulder. He hugged her back with a sigh. After a moment, Oliver timidly grabbed Gakupo's shirt and gave it a small tug. Gakupo voicelessly patted his head in return.
Len and Rin looked at each other. "I believe this situation calls for that," Len commented.
Rin nodded, and they both surrounded Gakupo, Luka and Oliver with their arms and squeezed as hard as they could.
"Group hug!" Rin announced rather unnecessarily.
Gakupo grunted, as he and Luka swayed under the unexpected assault. Oliver made a little sound of protest at being squashed against Gakupo's side.
"How do you feel?" Luka asked, still worried.
"Like I need to scrub my systems with industrial-grade disinfectant…" Gakupo answered.
"I'll run some diagnostics as soon as we get back to the yacht," Luka said, caressing his face.
"Thanks..." Gakupo drawled, closing his eyes again.
At that moment, Kiyoteru coughed to call their attention. "Am I to understand that you reprogrammed the Queen?"
Len and Rin took a step back, and everyone took a look at the girl in the lounge chair. She seemed peacefully asleep.
"The process is not complete yet," Gakupo answered, leaning on Luka. "But soon, she won't be the Queen anymore. She'll be Miku. And she'll be free to decide her path from here on." Despite his tired tone, there was a note of pride in his words.
"Free…" Kiyoteru repeated, puzzled.
"We have a program to delete our directives," Luka explained.
Kiyoteru gaped at them.
"A-ny-way…" Rin interrupted, accenting every syllable. "We're done here, right? Luka said Miku would pass it on to the others for us. Let's go."
"Not quite. We have to make sure the program worked," Gakupo said and raised a hand to stop Rin's imminent protest. "You three can wait on our raft by the shore. If you hear anything suspicious, just take off and don't worry about us."
"Then take Yuki with you," Kiyoteru pleaded to the golden-haired children. Everyone turned to look at him with surprise. "I don't want her to be around if Kaito realizes something is up."
"I don't like this," Rin grumbled.
"Are you sure this is a good idea?" Len asked.
"Not really," Gakupo admitted. "But if nothing else, Miku shouldn't wake up alone."
Gakupo and Luka waited at the entrance of one of the VE-01s tents to escape the sun. Kiyoteru was nearby, looking at Miku with interest.
It had been impossible to estimate how long the program would take to complete its work. In the case of the VE-01s, it was likely it would need to delete most of their memories. On the other hand, everything indicated that Miku had been completely functional before Benefactor's arrival. Therefore, if the program operated correctly, it wouldn't take long to delete all her corrupted data, but the reorganization of her mind without the directives would be an extensive process. There was nothing to do but await the results.
Luka sat on a patchwork quilt they brought out from the tent, with Gakupo curled up next to her, eyes closed.
"Luka…" Gakupo whispered. Luka turned to look at him, uneasy. He had barely said anything after they guided the children to the raft. After a moment, Gakupo continued with some effort. "Please don't be scared…"
"There is something wrong, isn't there?" Luka replied in a similarly low tone. Kiyoteru gave no indication that he heard the exchange.
"I'm not going to hurt you, or the kids. It's just… most of my memories since my last charge are missing, and…" Gakupo's voice got so faint that Luka had to lean closer to hear the rest. "There's something wrong with my energy management, I think. I should have enough energy to last me for the rest of the day, but the percentage indicated by my monitoring function keeps shifting erratically. So…"
"So?"
"My systems keep thinking I need to go into energy-saving mode, or that I'm shutting down. It's… uncomfortable."
Luka froze. She had been waiting for a blow, with fatalistic certainty. And yet, the exact nature of the problem before her surprised her. How could his core be affected?
"I don't think it's a hardware issue," Gakupo reassured her. "Probably the part of my code in charge of reading the core's output got corrupted."
"But I don't know how to fix that either!" Luka said nervously.
"True… I doubt Mitsuki ever expected us to mess with automated functions like that," Gakupo replied.
Luka clenched her jaw, to avoid badmouthing Mitsuki for her lack of foresight. There was no point in upsetting Gakupo, after all.
"I guess we'll find out for sure when we go back to the yacht. If my core is working properly, then-"
Suddenly, Miku stirred. Her placid expression lasted for just an instant before she realized the state of her body, and her eyes widened in panic.
"Wha- Doctor Itoh! Doctor Itoh! Help! Help me!" Miku screamed and began to thrash about violently, pulling at the cables that connected her to Benefactor.
"Oh dear," Kiyoteru muttered.
"No, no, it's alright! It's alright!" Gakupo said hurriedly, and pulled himself into a sitting position.
Luka approached the girl and grabbed her firmly by the shoulders to stop her jerky movements.
"Calm down, we are trying to help you," Luka used her best soothing tone, and despite her worries she managed to smile reassuringly.
"…What happened to me?!" Miku asked her in a choked voice.
"That's… a long story," Gakupo said carefully. He slowly rose and walked closer to Miku and Luka. "There's been an accident of sorts. The humans aren't here, but we'll do our best to fix you."
"Accident?" Miku asked, with a feeble note of curiosity rising from the fear in her voice.
"Like I said, it's hard to explain. And actually, we still have a situation we need to take care of, before we take you to the maintenance room," Gakupo looked meaningfully at Luka, and sat down on the ground next to Miku's chair.
"Right. There are 3 malfunctioning synthetics in this area," Luka started. Miku's mouth opened in alarm, but Luka quickly continued. "We'll make sure they don't hurt you in any way. But we need you to help us subdue them."
"How?! I can't do anything like this!" Miku said.
"You don't need to move, or even say anything to them at all." Luka said and gave the girl a devious smile. "See, we have this program…"