“He doesn't realize that I have an earpiece on. Adam should have been able to sense it. See it. Whatever he does in there should have allowed him to… interact with it somehow,” Troy told Dr Fidelis, who had been rapt with attention. “Do you think it might be some hardware damage on our end or something wrong on his?”

The reaction wasn't the greatest, with a quick flash of irritation, before a certain stillness came over his features. He was holding himself back from expressing himself truthfully. For his benefit, or for theirs, Troy wasn't sure.

“No way to know, until I see that earpiece in your ear,” Dr Fidelis replied, making a hand motion, hinting at a certain person needing to hang something over. “Give it here, please.”

Troy instantly complied, feeling no need to disobey. After all, this would benefit them both. And, it wasn't like he had any experience checking for damage. It hadn't even been too long ago, that he had handed over his personal earpiece. A few quick thoughts were spent thinking about its condition. He had not been told anything about it yet. That could be taken as positive or negative, depending on how one saw it.

A few throat noises emerged from Dr Fidelis. In the blink of an eye, its casing had been removed, letting them all see its tightly packed innards. From Troy's perspective, he saw nothing wrong with it all. Not a single thing wasn't looking malformed, with the tech inside having been in such a way, that it just didn't touch, where the casing was supposed to be. But, from the continued noises, coming from the holder of the earpiece, things weren't looking as good, as Troy originally.

“I can't find a thing wrong with this one,” Dr Fidelis stated. “And, there shouldn't have been an opportunity for any to appear. I checked this sweetheart out this morning, and she was working finer than anything I had seen, in a while.

The only type of damage, which could have been affecting her ability to work, should have been much more obvious. As in, there should either have been larger amounts of smoke coming from the inside, or the casing of it should have had some kind of clear damage. I think we can note this down, as a fault on Adam's end, buddy.”

Well, that was not good at all. If the problem had been on their end, it would likely have been easier to fix, than what was wrong with Adam recently. His hundred and eighty-degree turn, on how good he could function, was not within any standard of being alright.

Nevertheless, they had to relay the information over to him, no matter how little Troy liked to do so. He just hoped it would fix itself.

“Any guesses about, what's wrong?” Troy asked Dr Fidelis, as he began typing the information in.

A sigh was heard. They were becoming more common, as of lately.

“I can't say I have, buddy”, Dr Fidelis stated, not in his usual enthusiastic mood. “For both of us, this is completely new territory. According to what I know, Adam shouldn't even have been able to ignore the ports. But, he has. What else can he do, which he hadn't known about?”

The last question was left unanswered, with but just another sigh to accompany it all. He'd gone through most stages of grief now. Troy only hoped the cycle would end, after the last step had taken its toll.

'We can't find anything wrong on our end, Adam. There has to be something wrong with yours. We don't know what it is, but there has to be something, anything, which might disrupt. You said that you had trouble with communication methods before. Maybe it has something to do with that? Hope it helps.`, Troy sent, hoping that they would soon continue. Dr Hale was getting more restless bit by bit. While he was still unable to hear the constant conversation behind him, he knew it wasn't great.

Just to further complicate things for Adam, Troy's advice seemed to have been the best, which he had gotten for the longest of times. While it wasn't ranked at the very top, of words uttered by that mouth, it was nearly there, with it having a larger impact of his wellbeing.

Over a full minute into the whole process, of keeping himself together, Adam had thought himself to be experienced in it. There were still irregularities springing up here and there, a few thoughts trying to take up dominance over him, a few trying to give themselves away, and just one or two trying to find the reason for all of existence and life.

While the last had been easily answered, with a numerical estimation, the first complication had started quite the quandary. These were Adam's own thoughts. They obeyed his every wish and command, quite literally being an essential part of him. They shouldn't have been able to rebel.

Yet, they did. It wasn't too hard to squish down, with him taking a more… administrative role to one thought process. With how easy it followed orders, he had a few considerations on it being the original line. It was more… fleshed out, with a hidden depth, which he just couldn't grasp fully.

Then again, ordering an entity to comprehend itself was never going to go well.

Going back to the problem at hand, Adam had begun getting a larger concept, of how he had messed his ports up. The fact of the matter was, they weren't actually broken. Upon close examination, the ports were as operational as ever, with their source-lines readily available.

But, it didn't just stop at their entrances spitting out all their information. No, that would have just been way too easy for Adam to work with.

Sarcasm. It did work well in letting out a smaller amount of frustration. Yet, Adam had been worried, that he had been using it too much, as of lately.

Instead of the search for source-line information being simple, they were intricate to comprehend. For the sake of conscience, Adam had been thinking of these as literal lines, whole in nature, with the knowledge being spewed right out of the end.

This worked fine before the fracture had all but happened instantly. The grasp, which Adam had held over all the ports had been split between most, if not all, of the thought processes. What had once been a single, structured thread, had been split into a near endless amount.

He had been getting all of the information fine enough. It had just been filtered through, in smaller bits, throughout all of the memories. Right then and there, it would have been impossible for Adam to piece it all together retroactively. The effort needed to do such a thing, took more time, than what he had at his disposal. No, he needed to bring every single split end, of every single port, together, into a single thought process. It sounded impossible to do, in such little time, but it was all he could do.

Before he did such a thing, though, Adam would need to begin more, physical preparations. Quickening the entire preparation, as a whole, was much more important, than simply focusing on one aspect of the whole picture. Even if he got the ports up and working, in record time, Troy would still need to get himself ready, to go inside the so-called puzzle room. From earlier observations, the speed, at which he did this, was extremely slow, on the border of needing complaints to be made.

It would be better if he just started now. According to his estimates, it would only take Adam a slightly longer amount of time, to finish setting it all back in place. Well, at least, if nothing went terribly wrong

…

Adam was decently sure that Troy had warned him about using such wordings. While he couldn't figure out why it had been stated, that it would increase the chances of something negative occurring. It shouldn't have been possible, but there was no reason to tempt this so-called fate.

'Troy. The source of the problem has been located. Fixing it will require little to no outside help. The time required to fix it is on the timescale of several minutes, to the lower tens. While I do so, it would be greatly appreciated, if you prepare yourself to commence the testing. Dr Fidelis can take over for you if the earpiece proves to be impossible to communicate through temporarily.`, Adam sent over to Troy, hoping it would have been taken seriously.

While waiting for a confirmation to be sent back, he began planning the logistics of the whole situation. The source-lines had already been split up, flying to each, individual thought process. Confirming such was easy, with him simply picking a few random thought-processes out, and finding a thread or two attached.

Again, it was easy to find. The found lines were then picked up, as weird as it now sounded, and were collectively put on the strain of a single thought-thread. One for each port, of course.

What wasn't too easy though, would be removing all of the scattered the source-lines. If there was one, with each individual thought-process, wouldn't there be as many splits? And, with Adam finding more thought-process, each time he counted them, wouldn't the search be theoretically infinite? Data could always be split into more. At some point, understanding them retroactively would be improbable, but there would still be some system to it all.

How was Adam supposed to pick up more source-lines, if they just split into more, the moment he came upon them? It would be a fight against exponential growth!

The observer effect was not being kind to him, in the slightest. It was at that point when Adam finally understood what he needed to do. It was straightforward when the outside perspective was taken into play.

For the effect of observation to be nulled, in the effort, which he was trying to commit to, the need for observation needed to be culled. Adam needed to have no idea of what was going on. At least, to a more advanced level. He wasn't to allow himself to know, which thought-process he was removing, only that he was removing the threads from it.

And, if this too was to work correctly, Adam needed to follow two rudimentary rules. The first was the obvious law of non-observance. The other was the law of size-estimation. He had to continuously remove the threads from every thought process, except for the one designed to hold it. Yet, without knowing which thread he was currently working with, Adam was forced to hold the second criteria of size in place. Otherwise, he would just be messing it all up for himself, without even realising it.

This did an in the complication, of larger thread clusters being left, as it was. While nearly everything pointed to the threads being near-equally small, which further hinted at them distributing themself autonomously, there was still the chance of anomalies appearing, without any obvious indications of it being so. If this turned out to be true, the source lines would not turn out as they were supposed to, turning the data in incomplete gibberish. Not a result, which Adam could tolerate. And, the only clue into it actually being so, would only be shown at the presumed end, where he had collected all the lines that he could.

There was always the chance of a few lines being missed. He hoped he could figure it all out before it became too large a problem. Or, he would have to fix it all yet again, with the exact same method of source-line extraction.

With the method thought of, Adam was ready to begin the practical process. Before doing so, though, he would still have to wait for Troy to answer. With the still slowed down processing speed, this luckily wasn't too long a wait. That wasn't to say that it had been a comfortable wait, though. Adam was, beyond all, an entity needing stimulation of any kind. And, going through his memories was not currently enough, with the temptation of so much more, only waiting to be grasped firmly.

'One moment! Before I switch the control over to Dr Fidelis, he wants to know, if we can continue the stopped test, or if we're switching over to the next one. He would like to continue the one we haven't finished, but, if something in it triggered this whole ordeal, we aren't taking the chance of it happening again. What is your verdict? Do we continue, or do we skip?`, Troy sent back, subverting Adam's expectations.

Well, it wasn't too hard to imagine the need for this clarification. If this whole fracture repeated, Adam wasn't too sure that he could hold onto the control of his mind. Currently, the chaos was ordered, not being released into its true form. If it all multiplied, as it had before… he wasn't sure he could bring himself together again. Even he could only take so much.

So, what had originally caused it all? Adam had tried to figure it out before, yet it had proven to be inconclusive.

Taking a slight pause, in organising his thought streams, he immersed himself in an earlier memory. It wasn't the actual fracturing, of course. That particular moment was not coherent enough, for him to fully understand.

No, he spun the time back to just before it had all started when he had asked Troy to keep looking.

The wolves had begun realising their feast was ready, with no way for it to escape. The lone one, holding it by the back legs, had gotten a hoof smashed into one its eyes, causing it to bleed erratically. This hadn't caused it to realise its hold, of course, the remaining eye showing nothing but pure determination.

Adam had not understood this moment too much. The smart thing to do would have been to release its jaws and get away from any further potential of ocular damage. The gazelle had lost nearly all mobility, with the muscles on the leg being ripped too far apart for any real movement. It might have been adrenaline keeping the creature going, at this point, too focused on the task, than anything about its own safety. Maybe, food was more important for the group, than it was for the one entity to not get damaged.

Some would have called it noble. Adam called it a waste of potential.

And, then, there were the final moments. The other predators had come from the sides and were digging in, to their heart's content. From some of the obvious rib-markings, some of these had not eaten enough, for a sustained period of time. Their current meal would have allowed them a day or two of optimal functioning, before the inevitable stopping. Adam briefly wondered, if the others would have eaten the newly created carcass from their brothers in arms, or if they would have just left it be, and be slowly taken by the environment. While it would be just another waste, not to consume, it was apparently not looked great upon, to consume one of one's own species. Humans had even made several laws about it.

All of this had been ignored, when the near-final sounds began to come from the gazelle. It had not given up hope to survive, no matter how slight its chances of survival were. Adam had estimated, that it would die of blood loss no matter what, in less than an hour.

Yet, from the increasingly quickening group of predators coming closer and closer, he knew that it would not get to experience time for so long a while.

'No.`

Adam immediately stopped the memory, focusing back on his thought processes. While he had found the most likely reason for his current reaction, he had to make sure that it wouldn't end up with the same type of aftermath.

Holding his current processes tightly, he successfully stopped them from fracturing even further. Now that he knew the possibility of even happening was there, Adam was not of the opinion that the test would have any reason to continue.