Adam looks around at his surroundings, almost relishing the view. His whereabouts are nothing spectacular, just the dilapidated street corner that surrounds the entrance of his old dormitory. He takes a deep breath of the smoggy night air and lets out a satisfied sigh.
He walks into the building and up to the elevator door. Once inside, he types in code 372 and hits enter. The doors of the elevator close and he begins pacing the floor, muttering to himself.
“Don’t wake her up. Just exchange and leave. Exchange and leave. Don’t talk to her. Don’t even go look at her.”
He slaps himself in the cheek a few times and exits the elevator just as the doors open. As he walks down the hall, he takes incredibly light steps. He moves towards the dormitory in complete silence.
As he nears the door, he slips a small device out the end of his sleeve and presses it against an identifier socket. The socket reacts to the device and lights up a warm white, before pulsating and turning green. The bolt inside the door slides open and he gently presses it open.
Inside the dormitory it is almost completely dark. Adam pauses and lets his eyes adjust to the faint lighting.
Laying on the bed is a much younger Yume, and the lump on the opposite side is Yua. He hesitates for a moment, waiting to hear their breathing. After a satisfactory audio cue, Adam creeps towards them.
He daintily steps close to Yume, looking for something as he goes. He moves to the nightstand near Yume’s head. Nothing there aside from a glass of water. He then slowly drops to his knees and gets flat on the ground. He waves his arm around under the bed until he hits a small box. This is where Yume kept her keepsakes, and more importantly, this is where she hid her bracelet from her mother.
He does a little fist-pump motion and snatches the bracelet up. He pops out a few of the gems on the bracelet, exchanging all for nodes. He grabs one of the opal gems, and clicks it in a rhythmic pattern. It begins to flash and make a subtle ticking noise. It’s as if it’s counting down. Just as the last tick hits his ears, the stream of consciousness Yume has been viewing is interrupted.
All of Adam’s vision vanishes and is replaced by a black image. It’s as if Yume’s now viewing a feed of video. The screen cuts to static and then back to a black screen with large, white, sans-serif text.
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NODE ACCESS
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NODE ACCESS
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LINKED!
…
ERROR: 34917777777777777777777 - PREFERRED MEMORY N/A
…
REROUTING
…
RESUMING STREAM AS PREFERRED MEMORY DOES NOT EXIST
see: connection errors, DDoDS, or user death
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The screen vanishes and Yume is returned to Adam’s view from just before. Confused and concerned, she continues to view.
Adam sets the bracelet back down onto the nightstand. He stares at Yume for a moment and lightly caresses her hair. Adam begins to sob ever so faintly. Yume rolls over and stretches her arms out, bringing one down to scratch her scalp. She feels Adam’s hand against her and grabs onto it tightly, smiling a bit.
“Take your hands off of my daughter, Adam.” Speaks a terrible voice from behind him.
The lights flick on, and Yume bolts up in bed. Adam turns behind to find that Yua wasn’t in fact asleep in the bed behind Yume but is standing behind him against the wall.
“You thought you’d come and take her from me, after what you did?”
“And what exactly did I do, Yua? Is it a crime to see my daughter?”
Yua’s dimly lit face twists in anger. “She is no daughter of yours.”
“Your words hurt me so deeply. I miss you, Yua. I miss who you used to be.”
“Such sad words from a criminal. I can’t even look at you.”
“Do you feel nothing when you look at me?” Adam says, as his voice gets louder. “You can’t tell me there’s nothing left. You feel something, you must. I know you’re still in there somewhere.”
Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
Yua’s face contorts another degree. “There’s not a bone in my body that still loves you.” She says, with her eyes welling up behind her angered expression. “You sicken me!” She screams in a breaking voice.
“I can see it now, even if it’s just a sliver. That’s all I need to know to keep going.”
“You see nothing!” She shouts and the tears come out with it.
Adam moves towards Yua, to try and comfort her. Yua is trembling in a mix of anger and empty sadness. Yua had her memories hooked years prior, and Adam seems to have found a way to trigger those yearning emotions.
As Adam comforts Yua, the door to the dormitory bursts open. Two armed Chamber representatives burst through the door.
Yua snaps out of her momentary lapse of judgement. “He’s in here! He’s right here! Fugitive number one! Come get him!”
They rush into the room and point their firearms at Adam.
“HANDS AT YOUR SIDE AND AWAY FROM YOUR BODY, NOW!” One of them shout.
“Oh, you’re gonna bust a father for breaking in to see his wife and kid?” Adam responds calmly.
The representatives look at each other and smirk.
“We’re here looking for a fugitive. A false Lunarite.” Says the representative.
“And it looks like we found him!” Says the other.
They take a step towards Adam.
“I wouldn’t move any further if you want to keep all of your limbs.” Says Adam as two plasma knives extend from his wrists.
The representatives begin to laugh. “You gonna dismember us in front of your little girl?”
Adam looks towards Yume and then back to the representatives. He bows his head towards them and retracts the blades.
“So, what do you want from me?”
The men move close to him and one of them throws him to the ground and begins kicking at his stomach. Each swing has Adam grunting and screaming in pain. He looks towards Yume again who is now staring straight down at the bed, covering her ears, and rocking back and forth.
“You got yourself some wife there!” one says.
“Yeah! She led us right to you!” says the other.
They both share a triumphant laugh.
“She certainly learned a thing or two from your men.” Says Adam.
The men snicker as they continue to kick and punch Adam. It’s clear he’s starting to weaken and struggling to remain conscious. With the strength he has, he starts to wave and yell at Yume.
“Yume! Yume! Take you secrets to Hypatia! Show her! She needs to see them! Please, sweetheart, promise me!” He screams.
He looks towards Yume, who’s still staring straight down. Yua has covered her ears with her hands.
He starts again, a bit louder this time. “YUME! TAKE YOUR SECRETS TO PAT!”
He can tell it’s not getting through. The men are continuing to beat him senseless. In a last-ditch effort, Adam reaches down to his hand and pulls a node out of the slot on the top of his wrist. He places it into the port on his forehead.
His body violently pulses bright green light, completely filling the room in its hue. His veins sparkle and engorge with bright liquid. It feels incredible, quite similar to succumbing to Junk’s fixer, Yume thinks. It’s a bit different though, fixer relinquishes one’s control over their body. This is the opposite. Overwhelming control and power.
Every hair on Adam’s body pricks up, and it feels as though his peripheral vision increases. His vision becomes vivid and almost extrasensory. His muscles are slightly more pronounced and bulging. He takes in a deep breath and looks straight up at the men before him.
The two representatives stumble backwards in shock.
“Bye bye!” Adam says.
Before the men can react, his body phases away into nothing, much like when he and his team shifted getting into the pinnacle. He springs to his feet and darts out of the room, giggling to himself.
In a moment of realization, he loops back to the room, setting a note upon the bed right behind Yume. He zips out once again, having wasted a fraction of a second performing that action.
“They can’t catch me that easy.” He says to himself.
He runs towards the end of the hallway outside of the dormitory room. At the edge of the floor, between two other dorms, is a large window. He extends a long, slender blade from his wrist and slices a hole out of it.
He slips out of the window and onto the ledge overlooking the slums below. The heights from here are entirely dizzying. Yume instinctively tries to shut her eyes, then remembers that she is still within a memory.
Adam looks around and finds a pipe leading down a few floors. He grabs onto it and slides down, repeating this process until he reaches the bottom floor. Feeling quite proud of himself, he celebrates with a jump and fist pump into the air.
Seeing as he has made it to relative safety, he disengages his node, and pulls it from his forehead. He stares down at it in his hand. It’s a green node, almost identical to the one on Yume’s bracelet aside from a few minor gem-cut differences.
Out of the shadows of the dimly lit street, a small hand reaches into Adam’s palm and grabs the node.
“Thought you could sneak away to see your daughter one last time, Adam?”
Adam snarls his lips in anger.
“Who’s there!?”
“I intend to return this to my father, Adam.”
A child’s face shows itself from the darkness.
“Oh, perfect, the little twerp!” Adam chuckles. “That’s not your father’s node, Shingetsu.”
Shingetsu’s expression changes from a conceited calm to seething anger. He examines the node closer and upon realizing it is not the king’s, he crushes it in his hand.
“Where.” He says behind a lip bitten closed in vexation.
“Is that a question?”
“Where is my father’s gift” He asks, growing impatient.
“I destroyed it, kiddo!” Adam says, giggling a bit. “You’ll never see it again, unless you want to pick through thousands of pieces scattered across the pit.”
“How dare you! Do you have even the slightest idea how long he has taken to create that? It was my crowning jewel. Made from the very flesh and blood of your kind.”
“I’m well aware of what that is. Why do you think I destroyed it?”
“Humans are so pitifully ignorant; your words bring me pain. Have you forgotten the sacrifices we made to create such a node?”
“What do you mean, ‘we’? It is just you and your kind who cause us suffering. You don’t deserve the fruits of your labor when that labor is stolen, reaped from us peasants.”
“I find your views to be completely unintelligible. We gave humans nodes. We gave you a beautiful, structured society. You want to squander that for your self-righteousness.”
“These nodes are nothing more than cow tags. The only structure you provided us is the walls enclosing a slaughterhouse.”
“You are free to have your opinions, Adam. You are free to turn a blind eye to the greater power of the moon. However, I cannot let the destruction of my crown go unpunished.”
“Oh, come on, how long could it take to make another? You’re still killing us. Just go ask daddy to shit out another one for you.”
“What you destroyed required five hundred years of patience and sacrifice. Surely you and I can figure out a way to expedite that.”
“I’d rather die than help you.”
Adam bends down and grabs a knife that was hidden on his calve, holding it towards the child.
Shingetsu peers towards the knife now pressed against his throat and the blade suddenly bends and curls backwards. It pierces into Adam’s hand, and he drops it. Shingetsu pulls Adam’s head up to lock eyes, nearly touching their faces together.
“Oh, I won’t kill you. I will ensure you live through the entirety of re-creating my crowning jewel. Whether that takes five years or five hundred. You will exist only to view its renewal.” He whispers into Adam’s ear.
In a swift motion, the child telepathically lifts Adam into the air, and everything goes dark. Yume is abruptly released into the weightless abyss once again, marking the end of Adam’s memory.