[Arashi] [Cyberpunk!AU] Open Your Eyes (18)
[Title] Open Your Eyes (18)
[Author] honooko
[Rating] R
[Notes] My jump drive that holds this story disappeared in November. I had back ups of everything except the 1500 words I had added. It took me a bit to get used to the idea of that much work being gone; sorry. I'm better now.
Ohno did not waste a heartbeat; he flung his arms around his mother, squeezing her with all the joy and relief in his heart. She wasn't dead. She was here, alive, next to him. He loosened his hold slightly as he became aware of how frightening thin she was; his mother had always been petite, and she only came up to his nose, but this was...
He felt a curl of ice-cold fury rolling in his stomach as her shoulder blades stuck out against his arms.
His mother didn't seem to mind him nearly squeezing the lights out of her; she hugged him just as tightly, raising one hand to the back of his head and smoothing it down his hair, murmuring comforts. Ohno lost it then; he wrapped his arms around her waist, dropped his head to her shoulder, and let the tears he'd been holding back for so long fall. She cradled him, rocking them back and forth gently.
"Hush," she said softly. "None of this, now. It isn't the time."
Jun and Aiba stood to the side, waiting for their eyes to acclimate to the darkness. But they never seemed to do it, and Jun realized with a sick feeling that there was no light to acclimate to. It was utterly and totally dark. The buttons on their uniforms didn't even glow now.
Ohno pulled himself together after a moment, straightening back up and stepping back a bit from his mother. But one hand remained on the small of her back, as if he couldn't quite manage to let go of her completely now.
"How on earth did you find us?" his mother asked him. "It's not over yet, is it?"
"Is what over?" Jun asked with a frown no one could see.
"This," Ohno's mother replied primly. "This... overturning. No one quite knows what's going on, only that it's insane."
"It's not over," Aiba replied grimly. "Not even close, I'd say." Jun nodded his agreement, momentarily forgetting that no one could see him do it.
"These guys helped me get in," Ohno explained. "They're amazing Mom, they can do anything."
"Not anything," Jun hurried to amend at the same time as Aiba brightly responded with a "Yep!" Jun stuck out his elbow in the direction of where Aiba seemed to be, but he only hit empty air. It wasn't clear if Aiba had dodged, or simply wasn't there to begin with.
"So... where are we?" Aiba asked. Jun could tell he was trying to sound casual to mask something much more concerned.
"We don't know," Ohno's mother said darkly.
"We?" Ohno questioned. There was a sudden shuffling sound of many bodies at once. From the direction, Ohno guessed that they standing up from where they'd been huddled on the ground. He couldn't see anything, but he heard small whimpers, groans, and wheezy breathing that suggested however many people were here, most of them were injured in some way. Squeezing his mother again, Ohno thanked the Gods that while she seemed severely underfed, she was otherwise unhurt.
"We," his mother confirmed. "There's about forty of us in here, not that you can tell."
"There's… something else," a strange voice added. It was male, older, but something in the way he spoke sounded like there was a problem with his face. The sounds were warped slightly.
"Don't talk," a younger female voice said quickly. "You'll start bleeding again." She moved closer to them, arriving at Jun's left side and announcing her presence by clearing her throat. It was a good thing she hadn't just touched him; he was so wound up he probably would have shoved her away.
"This room is… wrong," she said, sounding confused by her own words. Ohno's mother picked up the explanation.
"It's dark. We tried to find lights, but there aren't any. No fixtures, no settings. It's also enormous."
"How big?" Aiba asked. Jun suspected Aiba was already trying to find a place for this on his mental picture of the map.
"We found the sides," Ohno's mother said. "They're about four hundred meters in each direction. But the back…"
"Is it far?" Ohno asked. There was a long period of dead silence before the young woman said, "We don't know."
"We started walking back," Ohno's mother said. "We had to stop when we found... everyone."
"Who?" Aiba asked.
"Everyone they brought in first," Ohno's mother said. "They're all back there. When we walked back, we found them." She barely paused."They're dead."
Jun and Aiba reacted powerfully; Aiba gasped, horror in the very sound, and Jun reached out for him to steady himself. At some point Aiba had moved closer to him, so it was easy to wrap a hand around Aiba's bicep. Jun squeezed, and he felt Aiba move closer still in response.
How many of these people did they know? How many of them had they seen torn from their homes and thrown into a truck to be dragged here to their deaths? How many of their friends laid in this gaping darkness, corpses that no one would ever be able to see and identify?
What the hell was going on here for things to fall apart so quickly?
"Dead?" Ohno asked, sounding as disbelieving and Jun and Aiba felt. "All of them?"
"There's no one alive back there," the man said hoarsely. "We called out, but no one answered."
"We didn't want-we couldn't walk any further. You could smell it all; they've been bringing people in here for more than two days," Ohno's mother said. "We don't know where the back is, but it's far enough for several hundred people to be here with more than enough space to spare.
"And we don't know how they died," she added.
There was something about this room that was bothering Ohno. It wasn't just the darkness, or the size, or the lack of electronics function. Something else was disturbingly wrong here, and he'd had enough experience with his instincts by now to trust the way his stomach was twisting. The hair on the back of his neck stood up and he didn't know why.
He closed his eyes; it was just as dark with them open, but closing his eyelids was a signal to the rest of his senses to kick in. He pictured the front of the room, and that immoveable door. He pictured the button panel, colored in a way only he could see. He pictured, not entirely willingly, the mass of corpses at the end of the room. He searched for the rotten smell his mother and the other prisoners were describing.
Ohno couldn't smell it. Hundreds of dead, and he couldn't catch a whiff.
"…Can you smell them now?" he asked, confused.
"I don't smell anything," Aiba said. Jun gathered himself before agreeing.
"No," Jun said. "They must be farther away than we think."
"How far do they have to be where you can't smell it?" Ohno asked. "After two days?"
It was in that very second that Ohno realized what felt so sickeningly wrong here. It wasn't just the people that were dead.
So was the air. Not a breeze stirred; not a breath moved across his face. There was no flow where they were, so close to a door. No hissing. No mechanical fans. No rushing at gaps.
Nothing.
The room was sealed, completely, from top to bottom and as far back as it went. And that was far enough to hide hundreds of dead even as they rotted.
He'd heard of this place, once. It was an idea suggested by one of his commanders. No one had believed for a second it would happen; it was too disgusting, even for the Force.
And yet here they were, standing in exactly the place imagined by a sick, twisted mind.
"I know how they died," Ohno said. "And I know how we're going to die next."
~
Mao wasted no time in getting Nino where he wanted to go. She walked at a brisk pace that left Nino half-trotting after her. She was slightly taller than him and wasn't burdened by the weight of a full Force uniform. Her heeled boots clicked on the flooring and Nino noted internally that even the sound of her moving sounded commanding. She led him in a winding maze of the building through several checkpoints; she always glided past as though it wasn't even there, and Nino followed her closely enough to escape as well.
She finally turned down a darkened hallway. She gestured imperiously at a very plain and unassuming door.
"You go in," she said when he stopped and waited for her to enter first. "I'll wait here."
"Won't that look strange?" Nino asked. She frowned at him.
"If you're going to do something stupid-don't give me that look, I know your type. You're going to do something stupid no matter what I, or Sakurai, say. I don't want to get caught up in your mess, thank you very much." Nino wasn't sure how she knew he was making a face under his helmet, but she seemed like the type of woman to secretly have psychic powers. Or something.
"Mao's position is kind of important to hold right now," Sho said apologetically in his ear. "She really can't afford to get seen doing something suspicious."
"I got it," Nino said, holding his hands up defensively. "Nobody wants to be in the pool when I start splashing." He saluted at Mao, deliberately doing it in as sloppy a manner as he could. The barest twitch of her mouth betrayed the smile she very nearly smothered.
"Don't get yourself killed, kid," she recommended. "Sakurai is fond of you and he's too nerdy to make friends easily."
"I'm not-that isn't-Mao!" Sho babbled. He seemed to have forgotten she couldn't hear him. Nino didn't pass on Sho's indignation, choosing instead to hold out a hand for her, a silent promise.
She took it, squeezed once, and let go. Nino turned to the door that could easily open into a closet.
Or a trap. He wasn't sure which would be worse, at this point.
He pushed it open, quickly shutting the door behind him. For a moment, everything was silent and dark. Then in a wave of light rolling out from the door, the room lit up. There were computer screens and controls everywhere; Nino's eleven-odd screens paled in comparison. Things hovered and slid through the air on crystal-clear tracks, moving forwards and back apparently of their own volition. Things flashed across the screens; he saw a riot, a man being trampled in the street; a checkpoint where one Force member was bodily shoving another against a wall and ripping the weapons from his hands; a quiet hallway that ended in a huge, blank door; the half-empty prison floors.
He didn't have time to sift through any of this. Besides, none of that was as important as what he needed to do.
"Nino?" Sho asked. He was a bit fuzzy, cutting in and out.
"Signal's bad," Nino said, glancing around and confirming he was the only person in the room. It seemed strange for such a big control center to be abandoned, but he wasn't going to question his luck at this point. Sho buzzed again, but Nino couldn't make it out at all.
"Wait, I can't hear you in this place."
He stepped forward, and three screens rushed forward to welcome him. A control pad also slid to the front, settling itself comfortably at waist height. Nino reached out to stroke the side of a screen, pleased with the programming that caused it to appear eager for instruction. It was the smallest details of systems that made the difference, he thought.
Nino tore off one glove; not having fingerprints made bare hands a non-issue. There were other concerns though, such as his face, so he left his helmet on. Tucked underneath his thumbnail was an impossibly small jump drive. It carried the hack he'd spent the better part of two years working on, but he had to find a port before he could run it. He glanced around the control panel, but he saw nothing.
"Um," he said, feeling silly for doing it. "Do you have-may I have a jump port please?"
To his complete surprise, the system helpfully whooshed forwards a small panel with several ports on it. He inserted his disk and waited. It only took a few seconds; the processing speed on a system this large was more than enough. At first, the interface squawked in alarm, sensing his hack beginning to open itself. But he silenced it quickly as his self-designed interface rolled across the screens.
"Just like home," he murmured to himself. His fingers danced across the keys, setting off processes and coding he knew back to front. This was his baby, his hope, the moment he'd been waiting for since… since he was too young to be plagued with the desire to learn what he needed to know.
One small screen settled itself in front of him, and nine others rolled back and arranged themselves into one large display. A search database opened up like a flower over the host interface, sending out roots into every niche and cranny of code and hijacking it for Nino's purpose.
Once it had settled itself, a simple parser appeared in the center of the data-flower. Nino took a deep breath before entering two words:
NINOMIYA KAZUKO
The data-flower pulsed as the question rolled through the information. Files began popping up around the display; photographs, papers, marriage certificates, birth certificates, and-
The parser flashed before pulling back. Another box had appeared. Nino sucked in a breath as his mother's face, smiling warmly, greeted him. It was an older photograph, probably just after he was born. She looked tired, but not desperate or afraid like he remembered. Beneath the photographer, he saw the words he knew all along would be there.
NINOMIYA KAZUKO
STATUS: DECEASED
He knew it would say it. That didn't make the pain lessen in the slightest. After one last moment of seeing his mother's almost-happy face, he waved it out with snap of his arm. The image threw itself off screen and out of sight immediately.
The parser returned. He steeled himself again. He entered another name.
NINOMIYA KAZUE
The system took longer to come up with an answer. A few photos flitted in and out, all of a very young girl. Her class photograph from kindergarten passed by, as well as several shots of her about five years older. They looked like they'd been taken from behind something; he wanted to study them closer. His memories of his mother had faded, but his sister had been taken before, and he remembered her even less. Even young, she had the same mouth as his mother, and their father's strong nose. A birth certificate floated by, then a photograph jumped forward with text beneath.
Nino closed his eyes. He could close the program now; he'd never have to know. He'd never have to see it. He could go on, innocent to her fate.
Or he could finally have closure. He opened his eyes.
The photo was of a twelve-year old girl. She had a black eye; she was holding an arrest slate with her name on it.
NINOMIYA KAZUE
STATUS: UNKNOWN
It took several steadying breaths before Nino could inhale properly. He kept re-reading the screen, completely thrown.
She was alive. She could be anywhere on the planet, but to the knowledge of the Ment, she was alive.
"-no!" Sho's voice crackled. "An-r-me!"
"What?!" Nino snapped, angry at being pulled away from the gift of his sister.
"I've lost them!" Sho nearly snarled. "All three of them! Their coms are dead and I didn't get a black-out warning from them!"
Nino froze.
"Well," he said. "That's not good."
Understatement of the century, Ninomiya.
[Author] honooko
[Rating] R
[Notes] My jump drive that holds this story disappeared in November. I had back ups of everything except the 1500 words I had added. It took me a bit to get used to the idea of that much work being gone; sorry. I'm better now.
Ohno did not waste a heartbeat; he flung his arms around his mother, squeezing her with all the joy and relief in his heart. She wasn't dead. She was here, alive, next to him. He loosened his hold slightly as he became aware of how frightening thin she was; his mother had always been petite, and she only came up to his nose, but this was...
He felt a curl of ice-cold fury rolling in his stomach as her shoulder blades stuck out against his arms.
His mother didn't seem to mind him nearly squeezing the lights out of her; she hugged him just as tightly, raising one hand to the back of his head and smoothing it down his hair, murmuring comforts. Ohno lost it then; he wrapped his arms around her waist, dropped his head to her shoulder, and let the tears he'd been holding back for so long fall. She cradled him, rocking them back and forth gently.
"Hush," she said softly. "None of this, now. It isn't the time."
Jun and Aiba stood to the side, waiting for their eyes to acclimate to the darkness. But they never seemed to do it, and Jun realized with a sick feeling that there was no light to acclimate to. It was utterly and totally dark. The buttons on their uniforms didn't even glow now.
Ohno pulled himself together after a moment, straightening back up and stepping back a bit from his mother. But one hand remained on the small of her back, as if he couldn't quite manage to let go of her completely now.
"How on earth did you find us?" his mother asked him. "It's not over yet, is it?"
"Is what over?" Jun asked with a frown no one could see.
"This," Ohno's mother replied primly. "This... overturning. No one quite knows what's going on, only that it's insane."
"It's not over," Aiba replied grimly. "Not even close, I'd say." Jun nodded his agreement, momentarily forgetting that no one could see him do it.
"These guys helped me get in," Ohno explained. "They're amazing Mom, they can do anything."
"Not anything," Jun hurried to amend at the same time as Aiba brightly responded with a "Yep!" Jun stuck out his elbow in the direction of where Aiba seemed to be, but he only hit empty air. It wasn't clear if Aiba had dodged, or simply wasn't there to begin with.
"So... where are we?" Aiba asked. Jun could tell he was trying to sound casual to mask something much more concerned.
"We don't know," Ohno's mother said darkly.
"We?" Ohno questioned. There was a sudden shuffling sound of many bodies at once. From the direction, Ohno guessed that they standing up from where they'd been huddled on the ground. He couldn't see anything, but he heard small whimpers, groans, and wheezy breathing that suggested however many people were here, most of them were injured in some way. Squeezing his mother again, Ohno thanked the Gods that while she seemed severely underfed, she was otherwise unhurt.
"We," his mother confirmed. "There's about forty of us in here, not that you can tell."
"There's… something else," a strange voice added. It was male, older, but something in the way he spoke sounded like there was a problem with his face. The sounds were warped slightly.
"Don't talk," a younger female voice said quickly. "You'll start bleeding again." She moved closer to them, arriving at Jun's left side and announcing her presence by clearing her throat. It was a good thing she hadn't just touched him; he was so wound up he probably would have shoved her away.
"This room is… wrong," she said, sounding confused by her own words. Ohno's mother picked up the explanation.
"It's dark. We tried to find lights, but there aren't any. No fixtures, no settings. It's also enormous."
"How big?" Aiba asked. Jun suspected Aiba was already trying to find a place for this on his mental picture of the map.
"We found the sides," Ohno's mother said. "They're about four hundred meters in each direction. But the back…"
"Is it far?" Ohno asked. There was a long period of dead silence before the young woman said, "We don't know."
"We started walking back," Ohno's mother said. "We had to stop when we found... everyone."
"Who?" Aiba asked.
"Everyone they brought in first," Ohno's mother said. "They're all back there. When we walked back, we found them." She barely paused."They're dead."
Jun and Aiba reacted powerfully; Aiba gasped, horror in the very sound, and Jun reached out for him to steady himself. At some point Aiba had moved closer to him, so it was easy to wrap a hand around Aiba's bicep. Jun squeezed, and he felt Aiba move closer still in response.
How many of these people did they know? How many of them had they seen torn from their homes and thrown into a truck to be dragged here to their deaths? How many of their friends laid in this gaping darkness, corpses that no one would ever be able to see and identify?
What the hell was going on here for things to fall apart so quickly?
"Dead?" Ohno asked, sounding as disbelieving and Jun and Aiba felt. "All of them?"
"There's no one alive back there," the man said hoarsely. "We called out, but no one answered."
"We didn't want-we couldn't walk any further. You could smell it all; they've been bringing people in here for more than two days," Ohno's mother said. "We don't know where the back is, but it's far enough for several hundred people to be here with more than enough space to spare.
"And we don't know how they died," she added.
There was something about this room that was bothering Ohno. It wasn't just the darkness, or the size, or the lack of electronics function. Something else was disturbingly wrong here, and he'd had enough experience with his instincts by now to trust the way his stomach was twisting. The hair on the back of his neck stood up and he didn't know why.
He closed his eyes; it was just as dark with them open, but closing his eyelids was a signal to the rest of his senses to kick in. He pictured the front of the room, and that immoveable door. He pictured the button panel, colored in a way only he could see. He pictured, not entirely willingly, the mass of corpses at the end of the room. He searched for the rotten smell his mother and the other prisoners were describing.
Ohno couldn't smell it. Hundreds of dead, and he couldn't catch a whiff.
"…Can you smell them now?" he asked, confused.
"I don't smell anything," Aiba said. Jun gathered himself before agreeing.
"No," Jun said. "They must be farther away than we think."
"How far do they have to be where you can't smell it?" Ohno asked. "After two days?"
It was in that very second that Ohno realized what felt so sickeningly wrong here. It wasn't just the people that were dead.
So was the air. Not a breeze stirred; not a breath moved across his face. There was no flow where they were, so close to a door. No hissing. No mechanical fans. No rushing at gaps.
Nothing.
The room was sealed, completely, from top to bottom and as far back as it went. And that was far enough to hide hundreds of dead even as they rotted.
He'd heard of this place, once. It was an idea suggested by one of his commanders. No one had believed for a second it would happen; it was too disgusting, even for the Force.
And yet here they were, standing in exactly the place imagined by a sick, twisted mind.
"I know how they died," Ohno said. "And I know how we're going to die next."
~
Mao wasted no time in getting Nino where he wanted to go. She walked at a brisk pace that left Nino half-trotting after her. She was slightly taller than him and wasn't burdened by the weight of a full Force uniform. Her heeled boots clicked on the flooring and Nino noted internally that even the sound of her moving sounded commanding. She led him in a winding maze of the building through several checkpoints; she always glided past as though it wasn't even there, and Nino followed her closely enough to escape as well.
She finally turned down a darkened hallway. She gestured imperiously at a very plain and unassuming door.
"You go in," she said when he stopped and waited for her to enter first. "I'll wait here."
"Won't that look strange?" Nino asked. She frowned at him.
"If you're going to do something stupid-don't give me that look, I know your type. You're going to do something stupid no matter what I, or Sakurai, say. I don't want to get caught up in your mess, thank you very much." Nino wasn't sure how she knew he was making a face under his helmet, but she seemed like the type of woman to secretly have psychic powers. Or something.
"Mao's position is kind of important to hold right now," Sho said apologetically in his ear. "She really can't afford to get seen doing something suspicious."
"I got it," Nino said, holding his hands up defensively. "Nobody wants to be in the pool when I start splashing." He saluted at Mao, deliberately doing it in as sloppy a manner as he could. The barest twitch of her mouth betrayed the smile she very nearly smothered.
"Don't get yourself killed, kid," she recommended. "Sakurai is fond of you and he's too nerdy to make friends easily."
"I'm not-that isn't-Mao!" Sho babbled. He seemed to have forgotten she couldn't hear him. Nino didn't pass on Sho's indignation, choosing instead to hold out a hand for her, a silent promise.
She took it, squeezed once, and let go. Nino turned to the door that could easily open into a closet.
Or a trap. He wasn't sure which would be worse, at this point.
He pushed it open, quickly shutting the door behind him. For a moment, everything was silent and dark. Then in a wave of light rolling out from the door, the room lit up. There were computer screens and controls everywhere; Nino's eleven-odd screens paled in comparison. Things hovered and slid through the air on crystal-clear tracks, moving forwards and back apparently of their own volition. Things flashed across the screens; he saw a riot, a man being trampled in the street; a checkpoint where one Force member was bodily shoving another against a wall and ripping the weapons from his hands; a quiet hallway that ended in a huge, blank door; the half-empty prison floors.
He didn't have time to sift through any of this. Besides, none of that was as important as what he needed to do.
"Nino?" Sho asked. He was a bit fuzzy, cutting in and out.
"Signal's bad," Nino said, glancing around and confirming he was the only person in the room. It seemed strange for such a big control center to be abandoned, but he wasn't going to question his luck at this point. Sho buzzed again, but Nino couldn't make it out at all.
"Wait, I can't hear you in this place."
He stepped forward, and three screens rushed forward to welcome him. A control pad also slid to the front, settling itself comfortably at waist height. Nino reached out to stroke the side of a screen, pleased with the programming that caused it to appear eager for instruction. It was the smallest details of systems that made the difference, he thought.
Nino tore off one glove; not having fingerprints made bare hands a non-issue. There were other concerns though, such as his face, so he left his helmet on. Tucked underneath his thumbnail was an impossibly small jump drive. It carried the hack he'd spent the better part of two years working on, but he had to find a port before he could run it. He glanced around the control panel, but he saw nothing.
"Um," he said, feeling silly for doing it. "Do you have-may I have a jump port please?"
To his complete surprise, the system helpfully whooshed forwards a small panel with several ports on it. He inserted his disk and waited. It only took a few seconds; the processing speed on a system this large was more than enough. At first, the interface squawked in alarm, sensing his hack beginning to open itself. But he silenced it quickly as his self-designed interface rolled across the screens.
"Just like home," he murmured to himself. His fingers danced across the keys, setting off processes and coding he knew back to front. This was his baby, his hope, the moment he'd been waiting for since… since he was too young to be plagued with the desire to learn what he needed to know.
One small screen settled itself in front of him, and nine others rolled back and arranged themselves into one large display. A search database opened up like a flower over the host interface, sending out roots into every niche and cranny of code and hijacking it for Nino's purpose.
Once it had settled itself, a simple parser appeared in the center of the data-flower. Nino took a deep breath before entering two words:
NINOMIYA KAZUKO
The data-flower pulsed as the question rolled through the information. Files began popping up around the display; photographs, papers, marriage certificates, birth certificates, and-
The parser flashed before pulling back. Another box had appeared. Nino sucked in a breath as his mother's face, smiling warmly, greeted him. It was an older photograph, probably just after he was born. She looked tired, but not desperate or afraid like he remembered. Beneath the photographer, he saw the words he knew all along would be there.
NINOMIYA KAZUKO
STATUS: DECEASED
He knew it would say it. That didn't make the pain lessen in the slightest. After one last moment of seeing his mother's almost-happy face, he waved it out with snap of his arm. The image threw itself off screen and out of sight immediately.
The parser returned. He steeled himself again. He entered another name.
NINOMIYA KAZUE
The system took longer to come up with an answer. A few photos flitted in and out, all of a very young girl. Her class photograph from kindergarten passed by, as well as several shots of her about five years older. They looked like they'd been taken from behind something; he wanted to study them closer. His memories of his mother had faded, but his sister had been taken before, and he remembered her even less. Even young, she had the same mouth as his mother, and their father's strong nose. A birth certificate floated by, then a photograph jumped forward with text beneath.
Nino closed his eyes. He could close the program now; he'd never have to know. He'd never have to see it. He could go on, innocent to her fate.
Or he could finally have closure. He opened his eyes.
The photo was of a twelve-year old girl. She had a black eye; she was holding an arrest slate with her name on it.
NINOMIYA KAZUE
STATUS: UNKNOWN
It took several steadying breaths before Nino could inhale properly. He kept re-reading the screen, completely thrown.
She was alive. She could be anywhere on the planet, but to the knowledge of the Ment, she was alive.
"-no!" Sho's voice crackled. "An-r-me!"
"What?!" Nino snapped, angry at being pulled away from the gift of his sister.
"I've lost them!" Sho nearly snarled. "All three of them! Their coms are dead and I didn't get a black-out warning from them!"
Nino froze.
"Well," he said. "That's not good."
Understatement of the century, Ninomiya.