Day 59: Cafeteria (noon)
By the time lunch rolled around, things still weren't getting any better. The voices hadn't gone away; instead, Firo was pretty sure they were getting more frequent. Ennis had been silent since last night, but Czes's voice had been an insistent buzz in his ear all morning
( Read more... )
Yes, yes he was.
Harvey watched with just the slightest indication of horror on his face as Zero lifted the spoon to his mouth. One of the maggots managed to wriggled off of the bite of food and plop back into the bowl below, which was for the best since Harvey might have actually started to gag otherwise. He wouldn't say he had a sensitive stomach in most cases, but this whole thing was so uncanny that he didn't know how to respond.
"All right," he said after a pause that had probably lasted for too long. "Go ahead and eat it then, if you want. But if you end up violently ill later, you'll know why." He shrugged; he didn't really want to be in a position where he had to watch someone eat spoiled food, but it wasn't like he had much of a choice at this point.
Either way, that was enough about the food. He was just going to focus on ignoring it for the rest of this conversation. "So, in case you hadn't figured it out yet, the pipe you grabbed should be back in your room tonight." If Zero was as new as he seemed, he'd probably been pretty annoyed when he'd woken up this morning. The way the military handled their items was something that all of them had been forced to get used to.
Reply
Maybe Mr. Dent had his reasons for reacting like that, but Zero was just...going to ignore his warnings and eat the mush anyway. If he was wrong, he was wrong, but he seriously couldn't see nor taste anything 'rotten' about the food. Besides, he'd skipped almost all of his morning meal to talk to Lana, and now his body was starting to complain about the lack of energy. Better to take a risk than miss out on another opportunity to keep this body well fueled.
What Dent said next about the pipe was much more important to discuss than the food supposedly being rotten, anyway. "I had been wondering about that," Zero said after swallowing another bite of food. Not just wondering, but also being pretty irritated, understandably. "Why would they return it to me, though?" If it was something that gave him a fighting chance, why would the soldiers allow him to have that advantage? It would make more sense for them to keep their prisoners defenseless, wouldn't it? Or was it more interesting to them otherwise?
Reply
It only half-worked, but whatever.
Zero went ahead and asked the obvious question, the sort of thing every newcomer ended up wondering about. Why did they let them out at night? Why did they heal their wounds (and extra fast, at that)? Why did they let them keep their weapons? "Same reason they let us wander around. They probably want to watch us, want to see what we're capable of. They can afford to do it because they know that we can't really get anywhere. Or that's what they think, at least. It's up to us to prove them wrong there."
Which had been going just great so far. Really. They'd managed to get someone killed and then have it shoved even further into their faces that they weren't in control by having him brought back like it was nothing.
Reply
So then, if anyone hoped to get out of here - or better yet, to find and take down the ones in charge - they were going to need to play the same game and use brain over brawn to win. There had to be some way, something the prisoners could do or somewhere they could go at night...
Admittedly, it would be easier to know what to do if he had a better understanding of what this place was capable of. But that appeared to be one of those things the institute did not want the prisoners to know, unfortunately. Yet Zero's earlier conversations involving that whole time period mess were still bothering him as he kept trying to understand how it was possible. After swallowing another bite of mush (while continuing to ignore any reactions Dent might have to his eating the food), he set his eating utensil down on the table for a moment and stared at the other man. "Mr. Dent, is Aguilar capable of creating time-space continuums?" To use a phrase that he had learned on the bulletin board. ...Er, maybe he should word that a little differently. "Or time travel." That's better.
Reply
But it wasn't a question that he could blow off or respond to with a resounding no, either. He wished he could and a few weeks ago he would have, but a hell of a lot had changed since then, for better or worse. He'd been forced to swallow some pretty bitter pills here. If Zero was asking, he was already on his way to believing it, so he might as well just clear it up for him.
"Yeah, you could say that," he said, wishing now that he had a glass of water or something. His mouth felt dry and ashy and he was pretty sure that the water would be safe to have, at the least. No point in dwelling on it, though. "For example, I'm from the year 2008. Someone else I know?" And it was weird, realizing that he didn't have to speak in the past tense about Jones. He was here somewhere, breathing. "He's from the 1930's. I saw proof of it myself." More or less. He still wasn't sure if that university had been an illusion, but it was still where Jones came from and it had definitely been like looking into a black and white photograph.
Reply
"And I'm from the 24th century," he added instead. In fact, my original form was made from technology that most likely doesn't exist in your time yet. But that, too, wasn't very relevant, so he would leave it out. "Last shift, I spoke to a kid who said he comes from four thousand years in the future. I'm still not sure how it's possible, but I can't deny it's true if there's proof." Proof, so far, was Albedo's word, word from the bulletin board, and now Mr. Dent's word.
Not to mention this whole business surrounding Zero's being human. No, it wasn't like time travel somehow put him into this body. However, the transformation was undeniable proof that something was made possible here that would otherwise be impossible to achieve back home. Time travel, then, could be the same sort of thing.
Reply
Which probably explained how they were even able to bring them all here in the first place. It had to be some sort of technology. Apparently they even had the ability to bring people back from the dead. When all of that was possible, encountering someone from the future wasn't as strange as it could have been.
That didn't stop him from staring for a moment. He'd spent the whole night with Zero and he wouldn't have guessed. Well, the strange name might have been a tip off, but Harvey didn't know why people would start naming their kids stupid things in the future. Maybe it had become trendy.
"Yeah, I don't know how they do it either." Time machine was the obvious answer, but it just seemed so fantastical. "But you realize you can't admit to something like that without giving me some idea of what it's like where you're from." More like when he was from, but if he corrected himself that'd just be cheesy.
Reply
That didn't mean it was a hopeless future. Explaining it to Dent straight may make him think that, so Zero decided he would be honest - just trying to word it in such a way so that things didn't sound worse than they really were.
"...It's hard to say. I don't know what it was like in 2008 so I can't make any comparisons. The technology in my time's far more advanced than it is in this place, though." He paused, deliberating his next few words before speaking again. "There have been many wars over the past few centuries, so the world isn't in great shape in my time." That shouldn't come as much of a surprise. Conflict was inevitable, after all. It had just been way, way too frequent in those earlier days, the days Zero still had trouble recalling with clarity. Perhaps that was for the better. "Humans have been working to restore what war tore down, but it's been a long process.
"...Oh. And another thing I should mention, Mr. Dent." Now that it was relevant to the topic at hand. "This isn't my original form. I am--or, I was a Reploid." He paused again, then remembered Dent's mentioned year and went on to explain, "They're androids with minds like humans, free will included. And they're very common in my time period."
That should be good enough of an explanation for now.
Reply
There was a reason that Harvey had decided to give up on fixing things. It was so much easier -- no, it made so much more sense to just go with the flow and embrace his own philosophy for things. At least now it was something realistic.
The technology part wasn't something Harvey was all that interested in, because a) he probably wouldn't be able to understand most of it and b) even if he could, all it would do was make him jealous for things that would never be invented in his lifetime.
But that was when Zero dropped a bombshell onto the conversation. Harvey's immediate reaction (to ask "what the hell is a Reploid?") was squelched by the other man's explanation. "Androids, huh?" That was one of those typical things people expected to be part of the future, but Harvey hadn't expected it to actually happen. "So how does that work?"
If he was going to have to believe this stuff, he might as well learn a thing or two about it. And he couldn't help but be curious, in the end.
Reply
"Anyway. A lot of Reploids are made to benefit humanity in some way, though we all have free will and many live with humans as civilians. So our creators either see us as partners or servants. But not all Reploids like humans, and not all humans can accept Reploids. Obviously there's been some conflict because of that." At least two centuries worth of conflict, thanks to madmen like Sigma and Weil. Zero had hoped humans and Reploids would have settled their differences after he'd left - at least, the human settlement at Area Zero had shown promise of peace between the two races. But if that person on the bulletin board was to be believed about Reploids 'becoming obsolete'...then...
...well, maybe he was looking at it all wrong. Maybe a 'Realian' was simply a more advanced Reploid, and 'obsolete' was an offensive version of 'evolving'? Hm. If that was the case, then there was no reason to be bothered...
But back on topic. Was that enough information for Mr. Dent right now? Probably. "If there's anything else you want to know, feel free to ask."
Reply
Of course, it wasn't surprising that these Reploids were mainly meant for the benefit of humans. That was why most machines were invented and produced, and Harvey didn't see why AI was going to stop that pattern. Did that mean that the Reploids had some sort of programming built into them after all? That was the only reason that they wouldn't rebel, right?
And yet even though the things were made to help, any human-like behavior was naturally going to lead to conflict and prejudice. Harvey really couldn't stand his own species sometimes.
He let out a sigh when Zero finished and then shook his head in response to the question. "No, I think I've heard enough, thanks." Any more of this was just going to depress him, probably, and he'd been dealing with that enough lately as is. "So being completely human must be a real mindtrip," he remarked as he leaned back in his seat and gave Zero another look over. There was something about the way the guy spoke and his vocabulary that made the whole thing a little more believable.
Reply
Leave a comment