One moment, Rex was breaking free of the control collar, as planned. The next–
Caesar hadn't realized that witch could move that fast.
The fight was, in a word, brutal. Rex was good, very good, even Caesar could see that, but against both an equal opponent and the relentless black pawns, even he had limits. Especially when he was avoiding lethal blows. It appeared he hadn't, quite, realized that the black pawns were robots.
That was an oversight on Caesar's part, he'd admit. He knew that Rex had the ability to detect nearby nanites, but he didn't know if that ability was behind the consciousness partition his parents had set up in the onboard AI, and even if it wasn't, well, having the ability to perceive something and understanding the information it gave you were two very different things. Especially under stress.
Black Knight crushed Rex's latest set of smack hands with a nanite-generated hammer, then tipped him over, wrapping him with her whip. He hit the floor hard, but it was obvious he was going to break free momentarily, and possibly even counter with his own whip build, but Black Knight's hammer shifted into a sword, and she brought it down through Rex's shoulder.
"Stop! Stop! What are you doing?" demanded Caesar.
The black pawns moved in, aiming at Rex from point blank range.
"Kill or control," said Black Knight. "That's Providence's current protocol. If we get your brother back under control, we can put 'cure' back on the table, but until then… What will it be?" The ultimatum, because that's what it was, was delivered in the same falsely pleasant tone Black Knight gave all her orders in.
Caesar clenched his jaw. Some people might think he was cold and disconnected, that he lacked empathy, feelings, care for anything that wasn't one of his experiments. Dr. Holiday, for example, had, shortly after Rex's disappearance, accused Caesar of being a psychopath.
Well. Caesar knew there was something not quite right about him. Never had felt like getting a diagnosis. But he hadn't cried over his parents' deaths, and he hadn't cried over Rex's disappearance. He certainly hadn't gotten as emotional as Holiday, or even Six.
But he did love his brother. He knew that love was just the result of neural connections in the brain, coupled with certain chemical reactions, but that didn't make it less real. He wanted his brother to be healthy and happy. That was love, yes?
But for Rex to be healthy and happy, he also had to be alive.
He met Rex's eyes. Rex, unlike Caesar, was emotional. Caesar could easily read the pain, fury, and fear on Rex's face. Fear that quickly slid into terror as Rex realized what Caesar was going to do.
"Dr. Salazar, your decision. You can stop stalling. We neutralized the robot monkey, and even all the Numbers working together couldn't break into this facility fast enough to keep me and my pawns from terminating this EVO."
"He-ahhhh!" Rex's protest was cut off with a sideways jerk of Black Knights blade, ending with a high-pitched whine. There was no blood - Rex, as a rule, didn't bleed. His nanites had instructions about that. But even so…
"Alright, alright!" said Caesar. "I'll do it! I'll just. This isn't something I can do immediately. I told you Rex's nanites were different." He had. Multiple times. Some of those times were even after his six-years-in-fifteen-minutes trip.
"I'd think it'd be a simple matter, considering you worked on him before. And your control of the Omega-1 during your… reappearance."
"I'd think," said Caesar, retrieving a set of new control collars and checking their serial numbers, "you'd appreciate the difficulty, considering anything that could easily be done to Rex could easily be done to you."
Black Knight's smile grew sharper, showing teeth. "Careful. Dr. Salazar."
Caesar made sure his tablet computer was synchronized with the main control computer and walked towards Rex. The pawns who weren't aiming at him were now aiming at Caesar. He held up the collars and his tablet. "I've got to start somewhere, right?"
"Let him by," said Black Knight in an almost magnanimous tone. She had a lot of practice with that one.
"Okay, mijo," said Caesar, with false cheer, "let's get started."
"Don't do thi–"
His protest was cut off as Black Knight changed the angle of her sword, enlarging the wound. Rex gasp, breath hitching, and Caesar decided the best way to handle this was fast, like ripping off a bandaid. He wrapped the first collar around Rex's neck.
Predictably, because Rex could be predictable, sometimes, (it was, Caesar thought, probably a result of many of his subconscious thought processes and actions being directed by nanite programs) the skin on his neck lit up with blue lines that crossed over onto the collar and took it apart.
"Don't–" said Caesar, quickly. "Don't. There's a reason I brought more than one, yes?"
"You have fifteen minutes. My arm is getting tired."
"Please, Rex, just… Let it happen."
Rex bit his lower lip and glared up at him. Caesar swallowed and checked his tablet, looked at what, exactly, Rex had done to the collar, and made a few adjustments. He had to - he had to get this right.
Despite the whip and despite the sword, Rex still tried to twitch away from the collar. This time, Caesar could hear the activation tone of the nanites. They'd intended to remove some of the audio cues after the nanites got out of the prototype phase, but since things had turned out the way they did, they'd never gotten around to it.
He kept an eye on the tablet, watching the feedback and already making adjustments to the next collar. When the second - or should he count it as the third? - one broke, it was ready to slide into place.
And… There! He'd need some more changes. Just a little more. But this time… Yes! He could stop Rex from breaking this one for long enough to get his foot in the door, at least. And Rex was wearing out.
He had limits. And Caesar wasn't exactly fighting fair.
He snapped the next collar - hopefully the last one - into place. The program, a construction command for the Omega-1, started running immediately, relaying its results to the tablet. Caesar watched them anxiously, but he didn't have much faith in that particular program as anything but a delaying tactic. Rex's self-programming capabilities had taken care of that particular backdoor within the first week of Caesar's return.
But the program he was loading up now was a bit different. Simple, yes, there wasn't time for anything complex, but hopefully effective, given Caesar's special permissions and privileges in the nanite system.
The second program worked like this: it sent a request for access to Rex's code interface, tagged with Caesar's administrator codes. For various ethical and practical reasons (their parents didn't quite trust Caesar not to use higher-level access for pranks) Caesar had never been given full, unimpeded access to Rex's nanite programming. But… the admin codes meant that he got a response. A little popup that said nothing but 'request denied.' Rex also could accept the request, but, well…
Caesar looked at Rex, whose face was screwed up into an expression of pained but determined confusion. That just didn't seem likely. Even if the request was handled entirely behind the consciousness partition.
The program didn't just send one request, though. It sent repeated requests. As many as it could, on a code loop only a few lines long.
The whirr of the nanites became more stressed as they worked on endless access requests. The nanites were tiny, brilliant computers, but they were, in the end, still computers. Computers (and everything, really), as a rule, generated heat when they were working. They'd managed to break physics in so many ways working on the nanite project, but not that one.
Rex began to sweat and pant as his body tried to regulate its internal temperature. Every inhale hitched and every exhale was accompanied by a pained whine. As a rule, Caesar didn't experience empathy, didn't feel with other people. Probably a mirror neuron problem. But this? This hurt.
He didn't want to do this.
His tablet beeped.
Their parents hadn't trusted Caesar not to play pranks on his little brother, but they did trust him to look after Rex's wellbeing in an emergency. An emergency like a significantly elevated body temperature and a huge hole in his body.
The popup now read, 'access granted.'
The first thing Caesar did was make a new back door. He was confident that this one, the one he used to get in just now, would be patched within a week. Probably some limit on access-requests-per-minute, even for admins.
Rex's code was a mess. Six years of unregulated self-modification would do that. Few of the new programs were instantly understandable, even to Caesar. Builds, wifi hacking tools, a series of 'handshakes' for various systems, dormant EVO-originating code, probably copied from people and animals he'd cured, active EVO code, from the same, a rather ingenious fix for a problem they'd never solved, back in the nanite project days. But buried underneath all that was the original code for Rex's nanites. Even the Omega-1.
He brought up the set of programs they'd written after the first time Rex had forgotten everything. It was just a little something to help him recognize them, trust them, in case it happened again. It was why it had been so easy to convince Rex to come with him, when they had met again.
But family wasn't the only thing on the list anymore. Dr. Holiday, Six, Noah, and even Bobo were there, primarily identified through their nanite loci, rather than the facial, vocal, and code recognition that identified the Salazars. Although, now that he looked, he could see that Rex had appended Caesar's nanite locus to his ID data.
He went to the part of the code that dictated how much and how the nanites could influence Rex's thoughts about a given person, and changed a few variables and permissions. He went back to the main list, added in Black Knight, and generated variables for her, too.
There. Rex was controlled. Not, perhaps, the same way all the other EVOs were, but with the values Caesar had just assigned, saying 'no' to him or Black Knight would be given roughly the same avoidance priority as self harm, and just being around them should feel vaguely pleasant.
Rex made a tiny noise of protest, but judging by how glazed over his eyes were, and how clammy his skin looked, Caesar doubted he was really aware of what Caesar had just done. He would be, though.
Caesar went back to the main list one more time, and told Rex's nanites that Rafael and Violeta Salazar were dead. The effect of this was immediate and far more dramatic. Rex started sobbing.
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry." He really was. But this was the fastest way to get to the other thing he wanted. The consciousness partition. Without their parents, Caesar was now recognized as having the highest level of admin access.
He… hesitated before he deleted it. There were a vast number of reasons it existed. The primary one being to keep ten-year-old Rex from accidentally deleting his liver, but also because the nanite project's… well, Caesar's… track record with AIs was not good, and even if this was more of an integrated intelligence, than an artificial one…
But Rex needed this. For that matter, if Caesar's original plan had worked, and Rex had escaped, and he got Providence to restart the project, and, and, and… Eventually, the partition would have been removed anyway, was the point.
He hit the button and moved on. Medical options. He brought up a list of prearranged medically-related voice commands - it was short, for emergency use only, in case Rex lost control of his nanites while he was ill. He interdicted Rex's builds, put them behind a voice authorization from a 'person of trust' and he desperately hoped Rex would figure out that particular loophole. He told the nanites to take over Rex's breathing reflex for the moment, because the way he was currently breathing had to be cutting him up on Black Knight's sword. He–
"That's been fifteen minutes, Dr. Salazar."
"Rex," said Caesar, clearly, "go to sleep."
Rex's eyes fluttered closed.
"There you go!" said Caesar, a horrible approximation of a smile on his face. "All under control!"
"Dr. Donevsky," said Black Knight.
Caesar flinched as the doctor approached from the side of the room. He hadn't noticed anyone else come in.
"It won't be the same as with the other EVOs, his base programming is too different," said Caesar, now anxious as Donevsky checked Rex's pulse and reflexes. "You won't be able to– To puppet him around. There are only a few voice commands he has to follow, but–"
Black Knight raised an eyebrow. "That doesn't sound like under control."
"I've made him trust us," said Caesar. "Even more than he trusts Holiday or Six. I've made it– You are familiar with Pavlov's experiments with dogs, aren't you?" It wasn't quite what was going on, but, honestly, he didn't want to explain it to Black Knight.
"He's really asleep, ma'am," said Donevsky, stepping back.
"Hm," said Black Knight. She withdrew her builds. "How long does this last for?"
"Eight hours," said Caesar. "That's the recommended amount, after all!"
"Interesting. We'll give this a trial run."
Other medical staff, who had been standing at the periphery of the room, came forward. They heaved Rex up onto a gurney and started taking more measurements and readings. Rex stayed entirely limp throughout, like a rag doll. The doctors conferred over their results for a moment, then started to wheel him out of the room. Caesar began to follow.
Black Knight's hand on his shoulder stopped him.
"I think we have some things to discuss, before you join your brother," she said.
.
It wasn't as if Rex had never been stabbed before. He had. Mostly by Van Kleiss and his stupid, stabby, sucky fingers. It sucked, but he could deal with it. Maybe with some complaining and a bit of encouragement from Dr. Holiday or Six, or some well-timed snark from Bobo, but he could deal with it.
On the other hand, the stuff that stabbed him usually wasn't this big and usually didn't stay stabbed in him for this long. Benefit of having the most awesome nanites on the planet was that he could safely ignore the whole 'don't remove the thing stabbing you or else you might bleed out' thing… Which he totally hadn't discovered by ignoring Holiday when she said 'don't remove the thing stabbing you or else you might bleed out.' Good times.
What wasn't a good time? The fact that the literal backstabbing he was dealing with had come after a metaphorical backstabbing.
(He was pretty sure that when people said siblings were a pain, they didn't mean like this.)
The whole 'tied up with a dozen guns pointed at him' thing was bad, also. But it was kind of… Expectedly bad? Like, it wasn't anything too out of the ordinary for his life, except for the when and where of it. But Caesar trying to mind control him? That was just…
Well. It sucked. What else was he supposed to say? He didn't know what to say, which was, maybe, why he wasn't saying anything while Black Knight was giving Caesar some kind of psycho speech about why he needed to be controlled.
He didn't know why she was bothering with that, honestly. Caesar had already decided to control him. With that stupidly easy to break collar… that Caesar had to know wouldn't work on him.
Ughhhhh sometimes he hated being the kind of person who gave others the benefit of the doubt.
He looked up and glared at Caesar, hard enough to hide any trace of hope. Not that he really kept a lot of hope as Caesar's expression went from 'blank' to 'resigned.'
A bunch of words that Dr. Holiday thought he didn't know went through his brain so fast they sounded like static. Caesar was a weirdo and a space case most of the time, but he also knew Rex, and his nanites, better than anyone else. Caesar had gotten him to build that freaky containment machine on remote control, sans collar. Caesar could screw him over so freaking much.
"Dr. Salazar, your decision. You can stop stalling. We neutralized the robot monkey, and even all the Numbers working together couldn't break into this facility fast enough to keep me and my pawns from terminating this EVO."
Robot monkey? Did that mean Bobo wasn't under control? And he hated it when people talked over him like he was some kind of object. "He-ahhhh!"
Black Knight must have moved her sword by, like, a foot, because Rex's entire arm and back lit up like they were on fire. In the back of his mind there was something with the general shape and texture of the few times his nanites had talked to him directly. Not that any information got through to Rex. It was probably just them trying to tell him how stabbed he was, so no biggie. He could figure that out on his own. He had this whole biological system called pain and more pain, oh, and get this, yet more pain, to help him figure it out! Wasn't that wonderful?
"Alright, alright!" said Caesar. "I'll do it! I'll just. This isn't something I can do immediately. I told you Rex's nanites were different."
Yeah, no kidding. He was sure Providence's new evil overlord knew nothing about that at all. It wasn't like Providence hadn't been studying them since Rex first got here.
Caesar strode across the room and out of Rex's immediate line of sight. His attempt to shift his position resulted in a heel being dug into his spine, the whip tightening to the point of crushing the air out of his lungs, and the sword being twisted so viciously his vision whited out for a second.
"...could easily be done to Rex could easily be done to you."
Okay, maybe more than a second.
"Careful. Dr. Salazar."
Rex blinked hard, still trying to follow what was going on around him. It could be done to Black Knight, too? All of this? The mind control thing? Something else?
"I've got to start somewhere, right?"
"Let him by," said Black Knight in an almost magnanimous tone. The agents between Caesar and Rex parted.
"Okay, mijo," said Caesar, with obvious false cheer, "let's get started."
Rex tried to catch Caesar's eyes. If Caesar didn't want to do this, maybe Rex could convince him not to. Sure, he wasn't at the point of things where he'd rather die than be mind controlled - he wasn't that noble, and he remembered the follow-up interviews from the Meechum incident - but seriously injured? Imprisoned? Those both sounded way better.
"Don't do thi–"
Black Knight wrenched her sword to one side, and Rex's argument was lost to agony. For a split second, he couldn't breathe, couldn't think, and when he could the collar was there. He sent his nanites against it, first disabling the code that let it send messages to his nanites, then telling it to disassemble stuff.
Not for the first time, Rex wondered why people didn't make things more mechanical and less electronic. If there wasn't an electronic disassembly command, it would be way harder for him to do stuff like this.
He wasn't going to ask anyone that, though. His life was hard enough as it was. Case in point, his current situation (which was bad).
"Don't–" said Caesar. "Don't. There's a reason I brought more than one, yes?"
What, was that some kind of threat? Rex had heard better.
"You have fifteen minutes. My arm is getting tired."
… or maybe he was talking to someone else. Again.
"Please, Rex, just… Let it happen."
Like heck. If Caesar and Black Knight were going to do this to him, he was going to make them work for it. In the spirit of that - and not because he was scared - he tried to pull away when Caesar picked up the next collar and put it on. Not that it did much good. But it didn't do Caesar any good, either, so there. Ha.
It had been harder, this time, though. Not a lot harder, but enough to make him apprehensive.
He really hoped Black Knight was wrong about that backup. He didn't think he'd be able to get out of this on his own, and he was liking his chances of holding out against mind control long term less and less.
He broke the next collar, too. That one had been hard, and Rex was starting to feel tired. More tired. His nanites were starting to protest being diverted from the giant gaping hole in his shoulder.
But Caesar already had the next collar around Rex's neck. Rex told his nanites to take it apart, too, but… they were… busy? He pushed through, overriding whatever was occupying them, and the collar fell off.
Caesar put the next one on.
For a second, Rex zoned out like he had when Caesar had been sending the Omega-1 instructions. When he came back to himself, he felt hot.
Well, he always felt hot. He was hot. Blisteringly good looking, even. But he was physically hot right now. Fever-level hot. Best he could compare it to was when his nanites had been working overtime trying to counteract the chupacabra poison. Except there was no chupacabra poison this time. Probably. What was Caesar doing to him?
He closed his eyes, trying to focus on getting his nanites back under control. There was a feeling like someone knocking, knocking, knocking on the back of his mind until the sound turned to jackhammer black noise. It hurt, and he was rapidly approaching the temperatures where it was hard for him to think. His skin felt slick and sticky, and he started to pant, even as the motion made Black Knight's sword saw back and forth inside him.
And then the building pressure against him disappeared all at once. He didn't exactly relax, but he did go limp, unable to maintain the state of tension from before. He was going to pass out, soon, he could tell. He hated passing out.
With difficulty, he opened his eyes to glare blearily at Caesar. He was hunched over his tablet, tapping away at the screen. Traitor. Backstabber. Jerk. It wasn't as if Rex hadn't been backstabbed by, like, everyone, except for Holiday, Bobo (except for really minor things), and Six (there had been that time with the Numbers, and the other thing with the memory loss, but, really, that was fine, water under the bridge and all), but family was supposed to be different. You were supposed to be able to trust family. Family wasn't supposed to try to mind control you for creepy middle-aged women, which is why Rex had to trust that Caesar was doing this for a very good reason.
Rex blinked slowly. There was something wrong with that train of thought. The people you… Caesar wouldn't mind control him just because. Caesar had betrayed him– But Caesar wouldn't do that. Had Rex misunderstood something? Somewhere? Was he not working for Black Knight? Except, Black Knight was a good person. He knew that. He trusted her. Good people didn't just mind control people for no reason. Or stab people for no reason. So, there had to be a reason. But it was so hard to think of one.
… Had he hurt someone?
A weak whine built in the back of his throat. He didn't remember hurting… But maybe he did? He was so angry about the control collars, but Black Knight and Caesar said they were good, so…? His thoughts felt so sticky and slow. What had he been thinking about before? Caesar and Black Knight had… They had been…?
He was hit with a wave of grief absolutely unlike anything he had ever experienced before. Grief, like something he'd always had, something he'd held so close he couldn't even see it, being ripped away from him without warning. A piece of his world, just gone, and he didn't even know what it was, just that he wanted it back, please, please, please.
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry."
Rex was sorry, too. He didn't know what he had done, but he wanted this to stop.
And then, something in the back of Rex's mind opened up, and his thoughts stopped being anything like coherent. He watched, more or less passively, as Caesar turned on emergency medical controls, put his builds on lock, and made the nanites actively regulate his breathing. Which actually did help, a little. Rex may have been hyperventilating.
Black Knight and Caesar started talking, but Rex couldn't follow anything they were saying at all. It was okay for him to just… zone out a bit, right? He could… obviously, they could take care of things…
"Rex," said Caesar, dragging Rex's attention back into the real world, if only for a moment, "go to sleep."