Chapter 3: Livin' in stereo, it's all right. Well I can be my own best friend...
General Sephiroth was not ready for this. He was not ready for this in the slightest. The fact that there were Shinra guards prepared to ambush him when he'd first emerged from the Lifestream was fine, Sephiroth had walked into (and inevitably out of) ambushes a great deal more deadly than a dozen men armed with assault rifles.
No, what completely blindsided him was the silver haired young man currently down on his knees trying and failing to choke back tears.
This was not a problem that could be solved by Sephiroth's skill with a blade or magic, unless he was willing to simply kill the young man and then continue with his escape. Not really an option, now that said young man had just unleashed powerful magic on Sephiroth's behalf.
So it looked like he was going to have to solve this problem his least favorite way… talking to other people.
Now that he'd decided what he was going to do, how the hell was he actually going to do it?
He took another moment to analyze what had just happened logically… hoping that "logic" would still still be useful in a situation this insane.
Put aside the fact that he'd called Sephiroth his brother; that was a problem for Future Sephiroth. This was a young man suffering from obvious mental fatigue after a combat experience. Sephiroth could work with that; this wasn't the first victim shell shock he'd encountered.
Don't think of him as a mysterious "what in the name of the Planet" enigma that made no sense, just think of him as a private fresh to the front line. All he had to do was get him capable of walking and talking again; somebody else would take care of things after that. Sephiroth desperately hoped somebody else would take care of things after that.
"What is your name?" Sephiroth asked.
"Kadaj," the young man sniffled.
Then he rubbed his black gloves against his face and wiped away a few tears.
"I really screwed this up didn't I?" Kadaj whimpered.
"They're all still alive." Sephiroth observed.
He wasn't averse to killing people who tried to shoot him, but he wasn't particularly interested in a body count, either. Based on the youth's reaction, Kadaj really didn't want blood on his hands. Probably for the best; so long as it didn't get in the way of winning battles a little squeamishness could be forgiven, it was certainly better than having to deal with a mad dog.
"Yeah… I guess you're right." A little more sniffling and slowly the tears stopped.
"You really are General Sephiroth… my big brother, right?" Kadaj pressed.
/Damnyou, Past Sephiroth.\
"Lets…. talk… about the... 'big brother' thing. I don't have any siblings."
"Oh that's easy to explain!" Kadaj's face brightened and he jumped to his feet, doubt and remorse banished by sheer enthusiasm.
"The thing is, you didn't have any siblings… then Shinra made me. I'm a clone based on your DNA, but allowing for different chromosome combinations, so if we were the same age we'd be fraternal rather than identical twins. I was was artificially aged in a tank full of mako harvested by this reactor!" Kadaj all but babbled with an a slightly too exuberant smile on his face.
That was a lot to unpack, even for General Sephiroth.
First, there was the fact that Shinra was trying to clone him. That did sound depressingly like something that they would do. Even when he was working for them, Sephiroth had been quite keenly aware of the fact that certain people high up in the Shinra organization (Simon cough Hojo) would have loved for him to be more tractable.
Secondly, just the fact that he was having this conversation meant that those same "certain people" had made disturbing progress relating to the mysterious project Sephiroth had discovered back at the Nibelheim reactor. Judging by Kadaj, Hojo wasn't just making monsters anymore…. or maybe he was just making monsters that looked more like people? Sephiroth was going to have to do something about that, one more mission to add to a quickly growing list.
At the moment, his biggest problem was that Kadaj believed that Sephiroth's and Shinra's aims were still aligned. So what was the best strategy to co-opt Shinra's newest biological superweapon?
"It's so great that you're back General Sephiroth; is there anything I can help you with?" Kadaj offered.
Sephiroth had heard of opportunity knocking, but this was the first time he'd experienced opportunity kicking your door down and leading a parade through your living room.
Still, how best to explain that when your big brother and the corporation he'd served for close to a decade stopped loving each other, it didn't mean that your big brother had stopped having a vested interested in his little brother's future?
"I do have a mission that I could use some help with. It is a mission that will require doing some things Shinra won't approve of..." Sephiroth tried to awkwardly ease his way into the matter.
Kadaj tilted his head to the side and gave Sephiroth a look that made him feel like he was trying to teach trigonometry to a toddler.
"Would it help if I explained all the bad things that Shinra has done to me? I'm willing, but… this isn't an ideal time to do so..." Sephiroth offered.
Kadaj's head slowly began to move, but it just kept on moving so that it ended up tilted to the right rather than the left.
"What… what do you need help with?" Kadaj more or less repeated his previous question.
The silver haired general was tempted to tell his "little brother" that he wouldn't believe exactly what sort of a problem Sephiroth was dealing with at the moment.
Then his brain helpfully reminded his instincts that he was talking to someone who thought discussing how he was Sephiroth's clone was a perfectly good ice breaker. In that light, Sephiroth suspected that Kadaj would be willing to believe quite a lot, so long as it was Sephiroth telling it to him.
"There's an ex-Shinra employe whose mind has been corrupted by an alien parasite. It commandeered his body, rewrote his priorities, and greatly amplified his aggression. It also made him powerful enough to survive our last encounter and has had several years to work on him since then. He's already destroyed an entire small town; I need to stop him before he gets a chance to do it again." Sephiroth admitted.
Kadaj broke into that disturbingly wide smile again, though it soon gave way to a series of awkward facial contortions and twitches before he somehow managed to both smile and frown at the same time.
"That's good, I mean it's really bad for all the people who lived in the town… and now kind of aren't living anymore… not to mention the possibility that other people might get hurt... but it totally sounds like a problem that I can help you with!" Kadaj promised.
Then the broken smile gave way to full frown.
"How exactly... do I help?" Kadaj wondered.
Sephiroth quickly created a mental checklist. This was going to be a lot different from the Wutain War, and while supply lines weren't likely to be an issue, supplies still would be.
"Do you have money?" Sephiroth asked.
It was crass, but Sephiroth had never let crassness get in the way of completing a mission before.
"No..." A crestfallen Kadaj admitted.
"We're going to go get some of it. Can you show me to the commissary?" Sephiroth inquired.
"The, what now?" Kadaj blinked in confusion.
"The place where people eat." Sephiroth promptly clarified, not especially surprised that the term might fall outside the young clone's vocabulary.
"Well, I eat in my room and..." Kadaj began.
In the time it would have taken Kadaj to figure how he wanted to finish that sentence Sephiroth had already done a little figuring of his own.
"Are you allowed to leave it whenever you want?" He asked, quite certain he already knew the answer.
"Not... really?" Kadaj admitted, his upbeat expression wilting once more.
It was almost disturbing how swiftly he switched between joy and sorrow, not to mention how openly he wore his emotions; Sephiroth was certain he'd never been like that, even as a child.
"If you can't leave it whenever you want to, it isn't your room; it's your cell." Sephiroth insisted.
Kadaj once again tilted his head to the side as his face was wracked by all too obvious confusion.
"But cells are for people who do bad things, and I haven't done anything bad… well what I just did with the lighting was sort of bad, but I didn't do anything bad before that, so why would Shinra be keeping me in a cell?" He 'reasoned'; if you could call it that.
"Remember when I mentioned Shinra having done the bad things to me? They used to keep me in a cell even though I hadn't anything bad either." Sephiroth pointed out.
He was actually underselling the matter to be perfectly honest; "cell" implied that you were able to move around inside of it, what they'd kept Sephiroth would be more accurately called a cage.
"But if they did bad things to you… why did you help them so much?" Kadaj wondered.
"That's a very long and complicated story that I'll tell you at another time. Do you still want to help me on my important mission, or do I need to take care of it alone?" Sephiroth felt a slight twinge of guilt; he'd known Kadaj for less than five minutes and was already emotionally blackmailing him.
He didn't have a choice though; if Shinra had sent Kadaj and a dozen guards down here, there were bound to be still more reinforcements arriving eventually. Sephiroth flat out didn't have the hours of time necessary to explain each and every mistake he'd made over the course of his life which had lead him to the mess he currently found himself in.
"I'll help! Can we escape without needing to hurt any of the doctors though? They're always so nice to me!" Kadaj awkwardly flip flopped between enthusiastic offers and making requests.
"If they don't try to stop me, I promise I won't hurt them." Sephiroth vowed.
Even with a brand new "recruit" to help him, though, Sephiroth knew that "personnel", would have to remain his next priority, once "funding" was settled. He and Zack working together hadn't quite been enough to get the job done the first time around. While Kadaj was an unexpected gift, war tended to favor the big battalions even if the type of "war" Sephiroth was planning on would probably have a different definition of "big" or even "battalion" for that matter.
Where else could he possibly get help from? He damn sure wasn't going to go crawling back to Shinra now that he knew everything they'd done to him. The problem was that outside of Shinra personnel who would be willing to risk their lives to help him? Being completely honest with himself, while Sephiroth had been excellent at leading an army, actually… making friends… wasn't his strong suit.
Then it came to him, there was one person he could think of… he just had to hope she was still alive, find out where she was, and hope that she was in the mood to drop whatever she was currently doing and help Sephiroth with his mission.
In short it was a long shot, but that was still better than no shot at all.
"Kadaj, follow me, we're going to go find the commissary." Sephiroth instructed, in the back of his mind suddenly aware that it had been five years since he'd last eaten, and some actual food might not go amiss alongside the funds he planned to plunder.
"Before we go, can I ask you one more question?" Kadaj implored, shuffling his feet awkwardly.
"What is it?" Sephiroth replied, suddenly feeling more on edge than he had any other point in this conversation.
"Is it okay if I call you 'Seph', big brother?" Kadaj pleaded.
General Sephiroth had never kicked a puppy before, but now he knew exactly how the poor theoretical canine would look at him if he had… and it had been raining… and the puppy had two broken legs… and a broken tail it was still trying to wag….
"If you absolutely must." Sephiroth finally caved, knowing full well he'd regret this that decision very soon and keep on regretting it for a very long time.
XXX XXX XXX
"Attention everyone in this research facility: yes I am General Sephiroth, and yes I am still alive. Before you even ask; yes I am also mildly miffed with the Shinra Electric Power Company over the little matters of leaving me for dead.
That said, I also understand that the vast majority of you people are just trying to collect a paycheck. Some of you might even have fooled yourselves into thinking you're making the world a better place. I'd suggest that all you spontaneously develop a cold, fever, or some other minor ailment and go home to get some sleep." Sephiroth advised the first group of scientist he came across.
"Yeah, if you don't follow my big brother's advice you're gonna regret it!" Kadaj added, substituting exuberance for actual charisma.
It was really impressive to Kadaj how quickly people moved to obey Sephiroth's orders, but then, that was why he was General Sephiroth, after all!
A short while later the two of them finally managed to locate the "commissary" that Sephiroth was so interested in, and they even had the entire place to themselves!
"Kadaj, this is a vending machine." Sephiroth explained, gesturing towards a large rectangle with three black sides and a single transparent one, with what looked like ration bars dangling tantalizingly inside it.
"Not only are they the quickest method of obtaining calories, but in a desperate situation, which this qualifies as, they're also a quick method of obtaining hard currency." Sephiroth paused, then glanced back at Kadaj.
"What I am about to do is not the normal method for using one of these." The lecture concluded.
He then shattered the transparent barrier with a casual, almost lazy, elbow strike. For a follow up, he kicked the side of the vending machine, bending it nearly in half and triggering a small flood of shining 25, 50 and 100 denomination gil coins from a little slot close to the bottom.
Kadaj couldn't help but marvel at his older brother's boundless wisdom.
Sephiroth then grabbed one of the ration bars that was dangling on some sort of rotating screw and headed over to the nearest table. On top of said table rested a laptop that Sephiroth had politely requested one of the departing scientist relinquish to help with his mission.
Siting down before it Sephiroth began to tap keys and Kadaj watched eagerly over his shoulder (after making sure to grab one of the ration bars for himself as well).
Kadaj chewed and swallowed faster than was entirely safe- it was Not Polite to talk with your mouth full, but his curiosity was becoming unbearable. After a five-second eternity, he could finally appease it.
"What are you doing?"
"Things seemed to have changed in the last five years, but I'm willing to bet Shinra hasn't changed THAT much. If doing something would take effort, but not doing it won't obviously cost them money, then no matter how reasonable it might be, they won't do it. So, let's find out if Shinra ever bothered to disable my company account…." As Sephiroth said those words, Kadaj couldn't help but notice that it was the closest he'd yet seen his big brother get to smiling.
XXX XXX XXX
Reeve Tuesti had a morning routine. He liked routines; they were a wonderful way of fooling yourself into thinking that so long as you did the same thing every day you'd get the same results.
He entered his office with his own personal coffee mug held in his right hand. Once upon a time, that mug had born an amusing slogan about how irregular mental faculties were not a requirement for employment yet would still prove beneficial. Alas, time had worn away at the mug, much as it had the nerves of its owner.
By this point all that was left of the prior slogan was simply "be crazy, it helps".
As one of the seven richest men on the planet, Reeve could have afforded a new mug… he could have afforded to buy a new coffee mug every day. For that matter, he could afford to simply toss his current coffee mug out the office window and endlessly repeat the process, buying a new mug to go with each cup of coffee he drank.
But this mug had been with him for a long time, he'd actually brought it with him on his first day of work at the Shinra Electric Power Company. Reeve looked down a the mug, and wondered if he could remember anything else about that day….
As familiar feelings of existential dread began to creep over him Reeve fought back the only way he could, by throwing himself into his morning routine. As the head of the Urban Development Department, Reeve was responsible for all of Shinra's infrastructure, both physical and virtual.
That was why he started every morning with a review of Shinra's web systems. Some days there were signs that the systems were being probed, and IP tracing often suggested that Wutai was to blame, while infiltration attempts launched from someplace closer to home could probably be blamed on an Avalanche cell.
Today, however, it seemed to be all quiet on the digital front. That, or whoever he was fighting with had managed to succeed so utterly and completely that Reeve wouldn't even be aware he'd suffered a defeat until it was too late. It was thoughts like those that made Reeve so very glad he'd managed to convince President Shinra to make all the systems relating to the monitoring and functioning of the company's mako reactors air-gapped and run on site.
What he didn't like thinking about was how he'd obtained the funding for that particular project.
It had required him to simultaneously send reactors 1, 5 and 8 into a stage one meltdown from his cellphone mid-meeting.
If by some Diabolus Ex Machina his cellphone service had cut out and he'd been unable to send the commands to restore the reactors to normal functioning, then Reeve Tuesti would be the martyred saint of every Avalanche cell from Midgar to Rocket Town.
Still, just because today's digital behavior seemed to be perfectly normal when viewed as a whole didn't mean that there wasn't a possibility of something slipping beneath his notice if he only looked at major trends. That was why Reeve's morning routine always concluded with him doing a thorough inspection of Shinra's "Black Server".
Reeve had once tried to get the Black Server decommissioned and replaced with a series of locked filing cabinets, but Hojo and Scarlet had united against his efforts, insisting that Shinra needed to stand for the future and the future was not filing cabinets.
So instead Reeve just had to live with the fact that the Black Server existed and would continue to exist.
It was where Shinra stored all of its most heavily guarded data; its contents were so secretive that even Reeve wasn't allowed to edit, read, or in some cases even view the names of its files.
Luckily, he was allowed to have a complete breakdown of who accessed the server and for what purposes. Analyzing this data helped calm Reeve's nerves immensely most days, since access to the Black Server tended to happened for fairly obvious reasons (even if they were only obvious in retrospect) like how Hojo had been uploading massive amounts of data to the server over the last few weeks because of his recently announced successes in project Second Silver.
Second Silver was, much like the Black Server, a Shinra project that Reeve would have all too happily decommissioned. It wasn't because abducting vagrants off of the street in order to use them as unwillingly guinea pigs for a science experiment was morally repulsive (which of course it was). It wasn't because the project alone had a larger budget then the entire Urban Development Department (which it did). It wasn't because it had dragged on for five years and only now was starting to produce something that might possibly be considered as a useful result (which indeed it had). It wasn't because the very concept of trying to recreate someone whose genetics hadn't exactly been baseline human to start with was fraught with all manner of complications (which it obviously was, hence the previously mentioned years going by without useful results). It was because at the end of the day the juice would never be worth the squeeze.
Even if somehow all the necessary pieces fell into place and Second Silver finally managed to generate a "New Sephiroth" for Shinra, what were they going to use him for? At the moment the only people who dared to "openly" oppose Shinra were Avalanche, and for some reason Reeve doubted that having a single invincible super-SOLDIER would be the most useful tool against a group of rebels whose favorite tactic was brief periods of high intensity violence before vanishing back into obscurity among Midgar's civilian population.
Thankfully, many days (like today) went by without anyone even needing to access the Black Server.
Just as his routine inspection was wrapping up, a number on Reeve's screen changed. A green line representing data usage that had previously resembled a dead man's heart-rate suddenly spiked upwards… much like Reeve's own pulse.
It was just a coincidence and a bit of bad luck, he insisted to himself, taking a huge gulp from his coffee mug and beginning to run the data on where exactly the Black Server was being accessed from.
The answer that came back was… North Crater. At least, that was the answer for about ten seconds. Then the system insisted that the user in question was accessing the Black Server from the Gold Saucer. After that, it was Costa Del Sol, then Wutai, then Fort Condor and then from the moon itself!
Reeve told himself not to panic, this was normal, at least normal enough given the circumstances. Whoever was accessing the Black Server was either using a device with top of the line Shinra location jamming software, or was accessing it from a location that had been deliberately designed so that all devices inside of it would have their location obscured. That was fine, it was even a good sign, it was only when someone accessed the Black Server without taking security precautions that he would really need to start panicking.
Still, Reeve couldn't help but dig a little deeper; what was this user doing, exactly?
As it turned out, they weren't uploading data, nor were they accessing it; they were downloading information off of the Black Server.
"Oh dear."
His fingers flew across the keyboard as he searched for still more information on this mysterious transaction. The file being downloaded covered the entire Nibelheim Incident and Shinra's response to it.
Reeve grabbed the company ID of whoever was doing the downloading and cross checked it against the user database.
When he got the result his jaw went slack.
His rational left brain promptly decided to grab a picket sign and go on strike until it was given a more sane version of reality to interact with. Thankfully his instinctual right brain was willing to step in and pick up the slack.
Reeve's fingers slammed against keys like he was trying to push some horrific monster back under the bed, then curled into a fist with which to pound the "ENTER" key hard enough that he was certain he'd need to buy a replacement.
That done, Reeve just sat there in his plush chair, his body so limp it was a surprise he didn't end up sliding out of it and landing on the floor. His eyes gazed up in horror at the screen before him, as if they couldn't believe what they were seeing.
UPDATE Users
SET Active = 'N'
WHERE UserFirstName = 'Sephiroth' AND UserLastName= 'Sephiroth';
Once the command had been executed all activity on the Black Server ceased.
Reeve began to reach out towards the paging device he used to contact Shinra's "General Affairs Auditing Department" thinking that he needed to tell someone what had just happened.
Then… then he remembered a saying from his past, back when he was in college; obtaining a double major in business administration and economics. Back when he'd still naively believed a company needed to make its customers happy if they wanted to make a profit.
"The secret to good business organization is that all employees understand there comes a time when they must be willing to lead, follow or get out of the way..."
Reeve decided that the time had come for him to do what Reeve Tuesti did best whenever something important happened at the Shinra Electric Power Company…. get out of the way.
XXX XXX XXX
A red icon popped up in the corner of the screen informing Sephiroth that his connection had been terminated, roughly five seconds after he'd finished downloading the file.
He opened it up and, knowing that even he didn't have time to read the entire thing, instead opted for a quick "find" command, looking for one name in particular.
To Sephiroth's surprise the name showed up only once in the file, and the passage containing it all dealt with events before the incident truly began. He tried a few misspellings or abbreviations of the name but still found nothing of value.
Refusing to simply give up Sephiroth decided to try an entirely different approach.
Shinra had terminated Sephiroth's personal access to the Black Server, but not to this laptop's connection to the internet. If the greatest and most secret of Shinra's files didn't have the answer, maybe, just maybe, it was simply just laying out there on the web, waiting for anyone to find it.
Thankfully, despite five years having passed since he last checked, his favorite search engine "Moogle" was still around, and a few keystrokes later, and he had his answer: not only was she still alive, but she owned a bar in Sector Seven!
Well, at least someone with the same name was still alive. It might be a good idea to do a little bit more investigation of "Seventh Heaven" just to make sure he wouldn't be wasting his time. Unsurprisingly, some hole in the wall bar from the slums didn't have their own web presence, but if he checked out a site that aggregated information on various restaurants….
"Beer is cheap, mixed drinks are both quick and excellent, and owner is a knockout... Handsy drunks patronize at their own risk. Five out of five, would totally be... defenestrated again?" Kadaj "helpfully" read the top rated review of the establishment over Sephiroth's shoulder.
Without a word Sephiroth closed the laptop and tucked it under his right arm.
"We need to leave before Shinra's reinforcements arrive. Kadaj, we're going bar hopping." Sephiroth announced.
"That sounds great, Seph! What's bar hopping?"
End Chapter.
AN: An "air-gapped" system is a computer system that has no connection to the wider internet at all, and instead must be accessed from a particular physical location. In real life nuclear power plant systems are air-gapped for exactly the same reason that Reeve convinced Shinra to air-gap their mako reactors.