Ashton Etrigan
Age: 28
Current Mass: 185 lbs/84 kg
Mental Status: Unconscious
Physical Status: Unconscious
The void was dark, cold and vast. I floated through black unconsciousness for maybe no more than ten seconds, but it felt much, much longer. I was strangely aware of myself, being there, in the blackness. It felt good… safe. I enjoyed the sensation created by the lack of resistance in my movements, and while it was dark and cold, I was able to still see myself, and I didn’t freeze. Small lights came into being. Either tiny and just out of reach, or enormous and far away, I couldn’t tell, but they were warm. They lit up the void like hundreds of lightbulbs, more popping into existence as I was floating along. Thousands. Hundreds of thousands. Millions. They filled my vision, and soon there were so many of them they pushed away the darkness I enjoyed so much. The lights blinded me with their brightness, and their heat became too much. A whining noise filled the space and brought with it pain that made it hard to concentrate. I curled up in my void and tried to escape the noise and the light and the pain. From somewhere impossibly far away I heard a voice.
“Ashton!”
I closed my ears to it.
“Come on, Ash,” it shouted again.
I can’t hear you. I don’t want to wake up. There is nothing-
“ASHTON, WAKE UP!” I recognized the voice. Deimos?
I opened my eyes, and suddenly I was back in the real world. Fire burned everywhere around me. The only sound I heard was screaming people. Everything in my body hurt. I was still alive.
I looked around and saw what had happened. The balconies had collapsed on top of each other, falling to the first floor and crushing everything beneath them. Everyone beneath them. I remembered the sound of splintering wood as they fell, and trying to get away from under them. I had managed to crawl under the table I sat at, which may have been the only reason I had survived as uninjured as I had. The metal legs of the table were still standing, holding several pieces of still intact table on them. A line had been cleared in the rubble, and I realized Deimos must have pulled me out from under the table and moved me somewhere safer. The seats around the table were smashed. Blood was splattered all over the floor and up the wall. I looked away before I saw the bodies it must have come from.
“Are you okay? Can you move? Ashton, come on, man, I need you to work with me here!”
Deimos had been speaking at me while I had taken in the scene around us. I turned my head slowly towards him and just stared at him.
“Get it together, Ash, we need to move! This place is coming down on top of us, and we have exhausted all the potential luck we were ever supposed to be given. Get. Your ass. UP!”
I nodded once, then tried to move my legs. One of them twitched, while the left just laid there, unresponsive. Then the pain from the void hit me again. This time I screamed.
“My leg! Deimos, I can’t move my leg! What the fuck is happening, where the fuck were you?!” I started babbling. The shock of the injury had kickstarted my system, and my brain jumped into overdrive to try to deal with the situation.
“You disappeared at the beginning of the show, and left me here with these…strangers, to deal with on my own!” I was shouting at him, just as desperate as the screams of everyone else in the burning hall. Screams of people dying. I tried not to think about it. Instead I kept shouting at Deimos. Partly because anything less than yelling would be hard to hear, but mostly because I wanted to.
“Why didn’t you tell me when you left? One second you were there, and in the next you were gone! Where did you go?! Why did you leave me behind?! I was all alone, and I couldn’t leave to look for you, because I had no idea where you went, and there were hundreds and hundreds of people in here, and… WHAT HAPPENED?!”
Deimos sat on his knees, still panting from the effort of pulling me from the rubble. He wore an intense look on his face, and there was a worry in it I couldn’t place.
It didn’t seem to be caused by our current situation, he was too… steady for that.
No, the worry in his eyes came from something different.
Something he’d done. I took a second to actually look at him. Then I understood.
Deimos was not okay.
His suit was ruined. His sleeves had rifts and tears, his tie was shredded, the seams in his pants were split entirely, and there were holes in the jacket. Up by his shoulder, Deimos had a hole, with a giant red splotch of color around it. There was another identical hole in his side, right above his hip, and when I shifted to see better I saw another hole on the side of his back, like something had gone straight through him.
They were bullet wounds.
Then I saw the metal case.
A large quadratic case with two metal handles clicked together to form one solid handhold. It had four clasps on the same surface as the handle, and three of them were opened. The last one was closed.
All the clasps had a digital display above it, with four rows of numbers.
The first one read 0 1 1 2
The next one read 3 5 8 13
The third read 21 34 55 89
The fourth one had just one number in the first row. 144.
I stared at the metal case in horror.
I reached a hand out towards it. Deimos saw me reach for it and grabbed the handle before I could get it, then pulled it away from me. I looked from the case and back at him, and was met by a cold look in his eyes.
“Forget you saw that,” he said flatly. He didn’t shout, or even yell, but I understood him well enough.
“It’s just a metal case. Now, come on. We’ve wasted enough time. We need to get out of here, fast! Several support structures have already collapsed, and the hall is too big to hold the ceiling without them. Sooner or later this place will be nothing more than rubble and crushed corpses, and I intend on becoming neither! So get up on your good leg, and LET’S GO!”
I heard the words and understood what they meant, but I was too deep in my head.
Something in my mind was screaming at me, saying there was something I was ignoring. Something important.
I’m usually very good at mental math, at least addition and subtraction as well as simple multiplication, from always having to calculate my budget at the start of every month. It gave me a sense of control over my life to see how much I was able to live on, and I enjoyed mastering the numbers on the screen without having to use a calculator.
I looked at the numbers on the metall case’s locks again.
The next one is… 233, right?
I didn’t get much time to think any more about that, because a new thought smashed itself into my head.. “What did you do?” I asked Deimos.
“Answer me, Deimos. I’m serious. Tell me what happened.”
He furrowed his brow and sneered at me. I had never seen him make a face like that before. It was as if I had suddenly become the source of all his problems, and now he was forced to face it all at once. It wasn’t fair. He’d left me! I was the one with no idea what was happening or why. He’d been the one responsible for all this when he went and stole the super dense thing that was gonna… gonna… fuck. It hit me like a freight train.
All of a sudden I understood where he’d gone and why he looked the way he did. He’d somehow snuck backstage, then stolen the metal case containing the object that was supposed to function as the ignition of the machine on stage. There must have been some kind of struggle, given the state he was in. A struggle he’d survived, despite having been shot at. How did it end? What did he do to get out of there?
I looked at Deimos with fresh horror now streaming down my eyes.
“You monster,” I whispered. “YOU MON-” He slapped me, hard, right across my left cheek.
“Yes, I stole the core. I might also have killed a few security people. They knew what they signed up for, especially considering the people they worked for, trust me.” He caught himself as he said those last words, and grimaced before he kept talking. “I realize that may have been an awkward turn of phrase, considering our current situation. I can tell you’re in shock, Ash. Honestly, I get it. I’d be pretty messed up too if my best friend had caused this kind of disaster. Luckily I didn’t! Before you start throwing blame around, know that I’m NOT responsible for this! All I did was steal the next tool for the super rich to oppress the poor.”
I stared at Deimos with wide eyes. “It was gonna help! Electricity would become free!” My voice was raspy, and my throat was beginning to hurt with all the smoke around us. I was unable to choke down a couple of coughs. “You’ve ruined everything!”
Deimos sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose with his free hand. “Here, see for yourself,” he said, and turned the metal case around so it was up-side down. On the bottom of the case, imprinted in the metal with big bold letters was a logo that read ‘Solomon Industries’, with the familiar image of an atom framing the words.
“You see, Ash? He already owns it, legally. There was never going to be any free electricity. They all knew it, the other companies and VIP’s. They probably came to try and wrangle a contract to get their own Well from Solomon so they could keep making money off of people like you and me. Even the people at Eleqwik knew. This presentation is practically a fundraiser, in all but name and appearance. Do you wanna guess how much money Eleqwik was willing to cough up for the rights to a Well? They offered forty-nine percent of their market shares. Simply for the rights to use one. They were denied, however, because they weren’t the only company that wanted it. All the other overdressed stiffs were here for probably the same reason as Eleqwik wanted me here. Sign a contract, or deny any other offer from ever reaching Mr. Solomon’s ears. There was gonna be a meet-and-greet after the presentation. You’d be able to meet The Doctor.”
Deimos shook his head slowly, then closed his eyes and sighed.
“I’m sorry.”
His voice was dry. All the smoke inhalation and that whole speech must’ve affected his throat somehow, because before he could say anything else he began coughing violently, his body shaking with each cough. He was also still bleeding from the bullet wounds, which probably didn’t help.
The sound of rocks clattering to the floor made us both look at the spot next to us, where a small pile of dust, dirt and rubble had started moving.
“His theory is correct, young man,” said a strained, feminine voice from beneath the rubble. “I couldn’t help but overhear your private conversation. Your friend is telling you the truth.”
The pile of rubble rose sharply, revealing The Doctor, clad in her lab coat, which was now stained and ruined by the debris she had been lying under.
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“Speak of the devil,” Deimos half whispered, conspiratorially. “How long have you been under there?”
Doctor Luscienne Astra stood to her full height while trying to dust off her coat. She cleared her throat and looked at Deimos.
“Long enough to hear of your little adventure. It took me a few moments to regain enough motor functions to free myself, and during that time I caught enough of your little speech to understand most of the situation.” She then looked at me and gave me a quick once-over. Her gaze stopped first at my leg, then at my hands, and finally at my eyes. She stared hard into my eyes for what seemed like forever, but after only a second she looked away again.
“Ashton, correct?” She asked.
I nodded my head at her.
“Hm. Your friend is telling you the truth. The Well is indeed owned by Solomon Industries. However, that’s not the whole story.” She stopped talking then and turned fully towards Deimos and the metal case. I tried to stand, but my leg wouldn’t listen to me, and the pain from touching it was too much for me to pull it in any useful direction. Doctor Astra spoke again.
“You are lightyears out of your league here, thief. You may have been able to deal with the very human aspect of our security, but that is where this ends for you. Hand over the Vault.”
The Doctors words were cold and calm, and something about the way she stood belied a confidence in her ability to force her way in this situation, if she had to, despite her beaten and ripped appearance.
However, I wasn’t paying attention to the situation unfolding in front of me. I was staring at the last digital lock on the metal case, and the one number was still glowing on it. 144.
I vaguely heard Deimos say something back at the Doctor, but their conversation had lost its meaning to me. All that mattered were the numbers. There was a pattern to them that I felt was somewhat familiar, but I just couldn’t grasp how it all added up.
Added up? It’s a sequence!
Subconsciously I think I had already figured that out when I recognized 233 as the next number in line.
233 plus 144 is… 377!
I was just one number away from being able to open the case. I had to know why that metal box was so important to so many people. For some reason all I could focus on through the smoke, pain and noise all around us was the contents inside that box. Deimos and The Doctor had moved slightly closer to each other, and The Doctor had pulled out some sort of remote from a pocket somewhere. Deimos was holding a hand to his side which had started bleeding from one of the bullet wounds. The situation was tense, but I paid them no attention. If I was right, and the sequence worked like I thought, I had the last number solved. I just needed to get a hold of the case, and keep it long enough to put in the last digits of the code while Deimos and the Doctor were busy. Then there was the chain around Deimos hand that secured it to the case as well, and I realized quickly that my problems were compounding fast.
I had to make a move soon. Doctor Astra seemed somehow very threatening despite her rather thin frame, and Deimos was bleeding too much to make whatever was going to happen last very long. I needed to make my move at the same time as either of them, and bet on them being too occupied by the other to notice me. I was also going to have to put weight on my very messed up leg that still wouldn’t move, which was yet another variable I hoped would go my way. So many things could go wrong. I still needed to open that case.
I pulled my good leg under me, slowly, readying myself to spring into action at the first sign of distraction. I didn’t have to wait long.
⬨⬨⬨
“You’re bleeding. We can fix that, quite easily, make sure it’s not infected and save you from a potentially slow and painful death.” Her words were cold and emotionless. She wasn’t trying to persuade Deimos, at least from my perspective, she was just stating facts. Like she was delivering a report. Deimos had grown visibly paler during the time we’d spent on the floor, despite all the ash and soot covering his face. His dark hair matted to his forehead in a cold sweat and his breathing was ragged. The Doctor on the other hand looked relatively good for someone who’d just shrugged off a heap of debris that they were trapped under. If I was a betting man, I’d give Deimos about a fifteen percent chance to overcome whatever The Doctor was planning, but then again, he was obviously good at hiding things. Even from his best friends.
Deimos coughed, and a splatter of blood hit the ground. “I’ll take my chances, Doc. Besides, I don’t think my insurance covers… all this,” he said and gestured at himself with his free hand. I saw something more besides the flippant attitude though. Right after the bloody cough, Deimos had bent his legs at the knees, almost like he was halfway sitting, and he’d switched the grip with which he held the metal case. It was now hanging in his fingers, as if he intended to throw the thing somewhere. The Doctor must have seen it too, because suddenly she raised her remote and punched several buttons in quick succession.
Despite Deimos’s injuries, he reacted immediately. He half turned and raised his arm to throw the case away, but before he could finish the arch, something happened and he cried out in pain. The case flew from his hand, but landed merely a few feet from where they were standing, where it clattered across the floor and stopped when it hit a fallen support beam. It was approximately fifteen feet between me and the case, I surmised. Not really that far away, if you could properly put weight on your leg. It seemed like Deimos had wanted to throw the case much farther away, but when I looked at his hand I saw what had happened. His fingers and palm were bright red and the skin seemed ripped, as if he’d been badly burned. The Doctor's remote must have been some type of control device that activated the case in various ways, and she’d wanted to force Deimos to let go of the handle.
The Doctor had turned to make a run for the case, but she wasn’t fast enough to get away from Deimos, who had started running at her the moment he let go of the case. He cradled his hand while he delivered a full bodyweight kick straight into her abdomen that sent The Doctor right to the ground. She tried to get back up, but the momentum of the kick brought Deimos down with her and he landed heavily on top of her. He managed to knock the remote out of the Doctor's hands before he began screaming. The Doctor had jammed her thumb into Deimos’s side, right where he was shot. I saw an opportunity. I took it.
Pain shot up from my left leg and into my spine, as I pulled myself up into a low standing position. I managed to keep my mouth shut so I didn’t alert the others. They were sprawled on the ground rolling around in an attempt to overpower the other. Deimos was clearly physically superior, however his injuries made his movements slow and weak, and The Doctor took advantage wherever she could. I looked away from them and gathered my focus. I had to use a hand to lift my still unresponsive leg, but it could at least carry some amount of weight without collapsing.
The biggest problem was the pain. Every step was like being shot in the spine, and I nearly chewed through the inside of my cheek as I slowly walked my way towards the distant case. I could deal with pain though. I was a magnet for bad luck as a child, banging my head on countertops, scraping my knees on gravel roads, falling off from tables in school. Okay, maybe not all bad luck, but painful nonetheless. I just had to take another five steps and I would reach my prize.
One step. A spike of pain shot through my hip.
Another step. The pain started seeping into my brain.
A third step. My vision blurred and I nearly vomited. I swallowed hard and refocused. There was just five feet between me and the case. I could see the numbers on the displays over each lock. The last lock still displayed only one number. 144.
I gritted my teeth and pushed off with my good leg, trying to reach as far as I could in one move. The little jump I managed was pitiful, and I fell over from the pulse of agony that came from the movement, but I successfully landed with one hand on the metal case with the super dense object inside. However, I didn’t do it very quietly. As I landed face first on the ground I yelped in pain at the moment of impact, and I heard Doctor Astras and Deimos suddenly stop scuffling. I needed to be quick. There were no indications of buttons or any other manual input on the locks of the case, only the light from the displays and the locks themselves. I panicked for a moment, thinking I’d made a horrible mistake not going for the Doctor's remote instead, but quickly realized something else. The case was already close to open, and it had been in Deimos’s hands before I woke up. He didn’t have the remote, so he must have found a way to input the numbers as soon as he came to the next one in the sequence. I glanced over to where Deimos and the Doctor were, and found them now clambering to reach me, each pulling the other down and trying to be the first to get up.
“You can’t open that case Ashton, you have no idea what you are doing!” Doctor Astra wasn’t as cold and calculating in her speech anymore, but there was a deep certainty in her words, as if she knew what she said to be the undeniable truth. Deimos clamped his hand over her mouth then and shouted, “She’s right Ash, just hold on to that case until I knock this bitch out, then we can get out of here and go somewhere safe. Agh, fucking shit!” He pulled his hand back, a large bite mark covering one side of it. “Who’s the bitch now?” grunted the Doctor around a mouthful of blood. Her calm demeanor was gone, and in its place was steely determination to get to me before Deimos could. I had no more time to think about it, so I went with my gut and tried the one method I could think of to open the case.
“Two-thirty-three, three-seventy-seven, six hundred and ten!”
To my surprise a small click sounded from the last lock, followed by a slight hissing noise as the case separated in the middle. The fourth digital display now showed four numbers, 144, 233, 377 and 610. All the displays turned green as the case opened up. I had done it!
“STOP,” came from both Deimos and Doctor Astra at the same time, but I couldn’t stop now. I pulled apart the two halves of the case and was momentarily blinded by a white light coming from inside it. A small orb, approximately the size of a large marble, was embedded in the middle, cradled by soft foam fabric. As my eyes adjusted to the light emanating from the bright orb I started noticing small details about it. I could see that swirling inside the orb was what seemed to me like liquid light, going in steady circles beneath the clear surface. The more I stared, the more nuances appeared in the light, and I saw hues of orange, blue and purple inside the swirling mass of the orb. It was beautiful. I picked up the orb, and held it between my thumb and index finger. It was surprisingly light for a supposedly “super dense” object, and it was cool to the touch.
“Hey buddy, I need you to give that back, you hear me?!” Deimos was standing now, free from The Doctor's grasp, who was lying on the ground, holding her arm. He looked anxious, holding both his arms out, palms up, in a very placating manner. He didn’t move any closer to me though, which I found strange. He’d fought so hard to regain control of the steel case, going so far as to get shot for it, but now that it was open he had suddenly grown cautious? Something felt wrong.
I looked around to check my surroundings, but nothing stood out to me. While I did, The Doctor slowly got up on her feet as well. Deimos had apparently broken her arm at some point, because she winced whenever it moved. She was glaring at me with desperation in her eyes.
No, wait, not at me. At the marble in my hand. Its light reflected in her eyes as they grew wide. Something I could only describe as fear passed over her face, but it was so quick I barely registered it. As soon as it appeared, it was gone, and Doctor Astra composed herself with what had to be trained ease.
“How did you open the Vault?” Her voice was crisp and clear, and every word she spoke was razor sharp. I heard her perfectly, as if she was standing right next to me, even though she was actually several meters away. She, too, was apparently unwilling to move any closer. I didn’t know how to interpret that, so I ignored it for the time being. I opened my mouth to speak, but a fountain of blood spewing from my mouth took me by surprise. I felt no pain this time, but that didn’t make me feel any better. That’s probably not a good sign, I thought quietly. I wiped the blood from my mouth and tried to speak again, this time managing it without any interruptions.
“I like numbers,” I started. “They’re not like people. People are difficult. People can lie.” I pointedly looked at Deimos before turning my face towards The Doctor again. “Numbers can’t lie. A seven and a three will always make a ten, no matter how you try to twist it. This makes sense to me. Human behavior can be whatever people want it to be, and I don’t understand how or why some people do the things they do.” I held the marble of light tightly in my hand as I spoke, trying to lift myself into a sitting position on the ground. I managed a half-sitting, half-lying position, with my good leg propped under my unresponsive leg. It was the only position I could manage without the use of both legs.
“Having said that, I don’t think I could have cracked the code entirely by myself.” My voice felt raspy, and I had to push my words out, harder and harder for each sentence. “Thanks, by the way,” I said and nodded at Deimos. He glared back at me, still unwilling to move.
“It took me a bit to figure out the sequence though. It’s been a while since I took 6th grade math, but eventually I remembered something about a golden ratio, and then it clicked.”
The Doctor actually laughed at that, making a sound that contrasted her image so violently that I almost thought I’d imagined it. I sounded like a mothers pride coming from seeing her child learning to walk. I didn’t know what to do, so I just sat there, uncomfortably. Deimos glanced at her as well, also looking pretty uncomfortable. She stopped laughing after only a second or two, and the feeling of warmth vanished immediately, leaving only the cold and calculating stare I’d come to realize was her standard expression.
“Right then, I will have to update any and all passcodes in the future,” she stated flatly.
“I likely would have done so anyway following this incident, but now I at least have a good excuse to make a properly complicated code for everything, so thank you, Ashton.” Her voice then dipped a few notes, and her expression grew more serious. “Now drop the star back into the Vault, yes, the metal case, and lock it again. The procedure is the same, just say the numbers in the same order you did to open it.”
I lifted the bright marble in my hand, and looked at the metal case, or the Vault as she called it. I was not about to do as she said, but I didn’t exactly have a lot of options. Something in my body had stopped functioning, because I no longer experienced any pain anywhere, and the world around me felt cold. It was like I had stepped one foot back into the Void from before, when Deimos had pulled me from unconsciousness, only this time there was no coming back. Wait a second, what did she call it…?
“Sorry about this, Ash,” was all I heard before Deimos suddenly acted. He sent a kick straight into The Doctor's side, then wrestled the remote control for the Vault out from her hands while she was doubled over in pain. I panicked as he started running, but there was nothing I could do. My good leg didn’t have enough strength to lift me by itself, and there was no way I could crawl away fast enough. That's assuming I’m not already past the point of surviving this to begin with.
Deimos was almost upon me when he veered to the side, and I realized he wasn’t going for me. He was going for the case.
Is he trying to avoid touching it directly?
The marble was still shining in my hand, held between my thumb and index finger. It swirled steadily. I had a thought, but hesitated, not knowing if my choice was in any way safe.
Deimos had picked up the metal case by that point, and was slowly inching his way towards me. I tried to glare angrily at him, despite my exhaustion. “Sorry about what? All of this? The dead convention goers? The fact that you’re clearly preparing to do something violent again? Or are you sorry for lying to me this whole time?” I spat the last words at him, and he stopped moving closer. His eyes flicked between my face and the marble in my hand.
“I’m sorry that I lied to you,” he sighed. “Honestly, I really am. If you’d just come along with me when you first woke up, we’d have been fine. I didn’t want you to end up like this. However, that thing in your hand is more important than that. More important than anything right now.” He held out the Vault to me, open, so that I could just reach out and put the marble back inside it. “So put it back in the case, and let me help you get out of here, before something even worse happens.” I kept glaring at him, not doing as he said. In the back of my mind I was racing through thoughts to find a different solution. It wasn’t looking good.
“Please, Ashton. Just put it back, and I’ll do anything you say. Answer any question. I promise,” he told me with a smile.
“Really?” I asked.
“Really,” he answered.
I reached up with my hand, holding the marble in front of my face, ready to put it back in the case. “Thank y-” was all Deimos said before I popped the marble into my mouth and swallowed as fast as I could.