Chapter Twenty Three Marco

Running both of his hands through his white hair in frustration, Marco scours over Five’s scan data at his home computer. He is no neuro scientist, but he can see that Dr. Morgan is either blind, or has been downplaying Five’s recent progress. By looking at the differences between the current and previous scans, he can see that changes are escalating. He expected to see a little bit more than usual since releasing the restrictions on her neurotransmitter system, but not this much. If he hadn’t just seen her, he would say that her mind had gone into overload.

Landmark memories are acting like nucleation sites that will shape her psyche in possibly irreversible ways. He hopes to god that her new experiences are positive and well-guided. The resulting traits are going to be imbedded like a tick. If her personality has been making a turn in the wrong direction, they’ll have to start over with a reprint from many months back.

The rumors of the assault are starting to bug him. He completely trusts Dr. Morgan with the truth, but he really needs to know what Five did for himself. Rumor was that Five-One had started to become Violent too. He knows first-hand that she was at least combative, but not actually dangerous. He wonders if maybe she was, and if both of them might be. He pulls up Five-One’s last scan and displays it on the auxiliary holographic projector. He compares both of their scans side-by-side to see if there are any unnatural trends affecting both of them.

Even though Five’s brain is slightly more developed, he can clearly see that the activity in Five-One’s brain is considerably more focused. He quickly looks around his apartment, as if someone might be watching, and then unlocks the lower cabinet of his desk. He pulls out a large, black, and heavy memory storage bank and hefts it up into the spare chair next to him. He wipes his finger across the white label on the front of it, reading Five-One across it. It’s a copy of the original organic scans of her brain, from back when Paul brought her body in.

He knows who she was, and he swore on his soul that he’d take it to his grave. He doesn’t condone what Paul did, but he does understand why he did it. If he were in his shoes, he might’ve thought about the same terrible choice. He knew she’d never remember who he was, but that was part of the point. He wanted to set her straight, give her a clean slate, and a life without him in it, just like she wanted. Maybe he took her last words to him a little too literally.

Marco didn’t know why he made the copies when he did, but he just had a feeling that they were too important to chance ever losing. There are probably thousands of people’s brains saved across the world, but it was not about the data, it was about the two girls. He felt a connection to them, like they were his responsibility, and he wanted to make sure they had a chance again, especially after what happened to them.

He backtracks through Five-One’s neural updates and stops at the seed location of her concentrated activity zones. It is color coded as being the amygdala portion of her brain. With a quick search of the word, everything falls into place. The nano-particle stimulant had, at an early stage, been coursing through that area of her mind. The more he looks into it, the more he confirms that she probably has issues with confrontation, anger, and risk.

The resulting development has not reached a point of no return for her, like with the progress point Five has reached, but her style of learning has certainly been set. If he can fix the stimulus problem, and bring her back, he should be able to get her ironed back out. It would be a big save for the project. He had thought it was such a grievous waste to let one of only two prototypes fail so easily, but Gabriel felt that she was only dragging them down. That lazy fucker has seemed quite rushed lately.

He automatically assumed he would need Gabriel’s help in fixing Five-One, but when he thinks about it, he really doesn’t. All he’ll have to do is temporarily inhibit the flow of stimulant to the overstimulated area and then they can proceed with her development again. He double checks Five’s scan once again to make sure she doesn’t have the same disorder. Luckily, she does not.

He will be taking a gamble, but he is fairly sure that Dr. Morgan was telling the truth about Five’s incident with Ray. He can’t imagine her as being a violent person. When he thinks about her, it makes him smile. He can only remember her ever having a kind spirit. With his elbow on his desk, he considers what he is getting himself into. His mind drifts over everything surrounding the project, and if things are ever going to pan out in time.

He can’t believe he spilled his guts to Dr. Morgan. She just happened to catch him while he was having a moment. He’s been so stressed about the whole thing, and not being able to talk about it, especially after what happened to Paul. He was so close. It feels like everything is starting to slip through their fingers now. He can’t imagine his future being in the hands of Gabriel and the other board members from here on. Paul was supposed to be like a judge over it all. He trusted him.

No one he has spoken with seems to know any actual facts about what happened to Five-One either. The guys said that they had to put her down because she attacked them, and that was it. There were never any real questions about how it all went down, nor did anyone look for any security footage in the area either. The others just took their word for it, cause she was known to get physical when frustrated.

If she really is dangerous though, he might be getting himself into real trouble. The last he saw of the prototype was in a cart that had been randomly shoved under a shelf in the back storage room. It looked pretty grizzly at first glance.

If the damage isn’t too bad, he might be able to have her up and running all on his own in fairly short order. When he saw the body, it didn’t look like any damage made it through the skull. He can’t imagine anything being able to make it through the bonded ceramic and titanium. A rifle might get through it, but not anything short of that.

While closing out his computer and locking the drives back up, he makes a mental list of what he’ll need to do in the morning. Glancing at his watch, he sees that it’s already one-o-clock. After only taking his shoes and shirt off, he plops down on top of his bed and pulls the edge of the blanket over himself. He plans to get up in only a couple hours anyway. He wants to get everything done before normal work hours. He doesn’t need any spectators. He’ll want to get in by at least five-o-clock at the latest.

When he wakes up, he goes through his typical morning routine, makes his coffee, and waters his bonsais. One at a time, he takes the miniature trees and lets them soak in the sink while he gets dressed. They’re really his only little joy away from work. His small apartment is so close to work that he doesn’t even park his car at home. The rest of his life, it seems, is dedicated to the Five-Series-project. He figures once he has time again, he can try to enjoy life once more, rather than fret over the dwindling years he has left.

As soon as he walks into the scanning lab at work, he instructs his assistant robot to go and fetch the body of Five-One. While he waits for its return, he rifles through some of the cabinets to get ready for repairing what systems he suspects will have been damaged. He starts by laying out a full assortment of tools and support devices. He pulls another main battery from the locker and places it on the cart alongside a new heat exchanger and set of cooling lines.

Just as he’s booting up the scanning systems, his assistant comes in with Five-One in its arms. He has it place her body on the scanner so that he can look it over. She is a bit bigger than he is and he simply cannot muscle her around himself. not at his age. When he looks her over more thoroughly, he can see the damage does not look to be as bad as he had remembered.

The chest does have a narrow, but deep, incision burnt all the way up through the rib cage to her face. The battery has obviously been ruptured and has burned out from between a few of her ribs. It’s what caused most of the charring. Though her ribs have been stripped of their tissues, they won’t need to be replaced.

After pulling back some of the cleaved tissue, he sees that some of the ligaments on the right side have been cut too, but structurally, everything looks like it will be fine. Most of the damage, especially what has been done to the face, is only cosmetic. He jests with his assistant that her face might look better now than it did before.

Being modelled after the cadaver, Five-One had a face only her mother could have loved. At first glance, he suspected that she might have been into some drugs. That would explain the contention between her and Paul. Either way, there were no signs of brain damage in her scans, so she was given the green light. The artist that did the work modelling her sure was indignant about wasting his efforts on a homely machine. Apparently the man’s work is the most sought after in the world, but he could not refuse an order from the CEO.

It was the woman’s particular narrow eye spacing, weak cheeks, and bony jaw that didn’t do her any favors. As for her body, it actually looked pretty decent on its own. He stands back and holds his hand out to block his view of her head. Her build is what he would refer to as being definitely respectable. Either way, it will all have to be completely redone. The blast from the weapon has cleaved through many of the facial muscles, boiled out of one of her eyes, and burned her lips up away from her teeth.

Normally a spare body would be in stock, but not for the two prototypes. It’s too secret for any of that. Marco goes ahead and takes a full scan of her brain before anything else, to make sure it’s still good, before anything else. The energy weapon may not have caused any structural damage, but it could still have fried the controller through the bus work.

While the machine is taking its scan, he pulls the skin up at her ribs, unzips the hidden maintenance seam, and slides the ruptured battery pack out of her torso. He has to reach his hand all the way up into the chest cavity to grab what is left of the upper tubes coming down from the throat. His assistant helps by vacuuming up what has leaked out of the heat exchanger and wipes away the smoke residue from inside the body.

Once everything looks ok inside, he goes ahead and installs all the new hardware. To hold everything in place, he inserts some new soft support tissues around the battery as his assistant hands them to him. Lastly he snaps the battery harness into its plug on the system bus and gets her ready to boot up.

When he reaches down to buckle the wrist restraints, in preparation for a typical shaky boot up, Five-One’s eyelids suddenly flick open. His face is right in front of hers and she has locked eyes with him. Startled, he immediately straightens up and stumbles backward. Like a spring loaded mummy, Five-One twists forward at him with lightning speed. She cries out with a torn and violent scream, reaching for him with her fingers curled as if they were claws.

He tries to scramble away but he flails over the flat cart behind him. The ruined battery and everything else smashes down onto the floor along with him. On the verge of a heart attack he scoots himself backwards across the floor towards the door as fast as he can. On the other side, he slams it shut and hammers at the access lock button with the bottom of his fist. With his back pushing against the door, he snatches at his little bottle of nitro pills, fully expecting to need one. He waits a minute, trying to calm down, asses himself, and take a few deep breaths. Five-One is no longer screaming, and everything has gone silent.

Slowly peeking around the edge of the door’s window, he half expects her to slam against the door at him, like some kind of science experiment gone wrong. Strangely, she is not even in sight. He quickly looks down both ends of the hall, hoping she didn’t escape at the same time as he did. He doesn’t see or hear anything to indicate so.

Looking back into the room again, he notices that his assistant is looking down at the floor on the other side of the main stainless steel workbench. It has also been knocked over. He can barely hear it saying something from behind the glass. Briefly Five-One’s disparaging face glances over the top of the table at him and ducks back down again. He does the same, and hides back behind the door.

He can’t believe what has just happened. He’s way too scared to go back in, and there’s only two more hours left before someone is bound to show up. After all of the safety incidents of late, it’s going to look really bad when everyone finds him barricaded outside the lab and Five-One alive in there.

He slides his back down against the door and leans against it while he sits on the floor. With his elbows on his knees, and his hands on his face, he tries to figure out just how he’s going to salvage the situation. He could never have suspected the damn thing to come back to life like that. They always use the boot module to restart them. He hadn’t considered that she wasn’t properly powered down to begin with.

He knows his only option right now is to call Valerie. Now that he has come clean with her, and seen her reaction, he feels he can count on her to help him out. She won’t throw him under the bus like Gabriel would. That fat piece of shit has been waiting for the perfect opportunity to get rid of him. Something low-brow like this might actually be enough.

The weasel would have him thrown out on the curb and take all the credit for everything. He already has a feeling the board doesn’t plan on holding up their end of the bargain as it is. Now that they have an external supplier to make his artificial synapses, they probably consider him to be a loose end.

He did tell Valerie that he would have her back if anyone made anything out of Ray’s incident, she should at least do the same for him. He rolls over on his side and pulls his phone out of his back pocket. He glances back up at the window again and talks into his phone. “Call Dr. Morgan.” On the other side of the door, he faintly hears Five-One ask his assistant “where is Five-Two?”