by Unknown
“They erased history?”
“Sort of...A lot of information, I know that, I know it personally, seems to have been removed from the system. As a matter of fact, when I just started this job, my sensei talked about times when most of his missions were related to covering up some things that emperor didn’t want to be known…I can’t vouch that ever happened, but those were his words.”
“I understand. There might be a whole universe around us filled with humans we have no knowledge off, no way of getting in touch with, beings we know nothing off.”
“I am quite certain that the backup of all of the information is kept someplace, but I could never find it. Also, my current rank just doesn't have a sufficient clearance - my clearance does not go deep enough to look at all the information that is available.”
“I understand. Because you got demoted?”
“Well, when I had a golden ranking, I had an excess to even look into people’s homes...then I got demoted to green, and now I am in red...”
“One more mess up and you are out...”
“Yes, thank you for reminding me. And you are certainly not helping running unauthorized scans with my access codes.”
“Working together with an assassin doesn't help either. Hope they never find out about her.”
“If it was not for her, we both would be dead now. Deal like in never-coming back dead.”
“Anyway”, Val continued after the reality of the recent attack started to sink into Timor, ”We moved away from the subject. But now that I’ve stopped to think about it, that is why the Capitan was insisting in taking us to the restaurant… It was not a bribe to get to our good side, but a way to get us out of that hanger before they finish sweeping it all through. They were trying to delay everything before they could clean it up! That’s why there were only a few investigators there at the dome. They obviously didn’t want anybody to know about it.”
“That also means that not a whole department is involve in this cover up, or whatever it is”
“We know at least 5 people that are involved. Yeah, they would not risk the whole department knowing since it’s known that Emperor has informants and spies everywhere.”
“So, now we know at least where to start…We need to find a weak link among those five and see what they can tell us.”
“Well, two officers tried to take me down, and Mikka, or whatever her real name is, got the two sent for you-
“If those are the four that were there at the dome…”
“I, I could not confirm their identity, those men that worked in the dome, I mean. I was trying to access the video feed from the dome, but there seem to be problems. It seems that no files exist.”
“Forget about it…they knew what they were doing and cutting out the video feed was the first thing they would have done. We won’t find them anywhere. They made sure that they covered their tracks.”
“We do need to know who is involved in this cover up.”
“Yes, well, we can do something else…We can check who the Capitan was communicating the most during those periods…look at their files, faces, you were standing much closer to them, You could probably even recognize them. So, that is what you need to do.”
“We might also be able to get to the captain.”
“Yes, yes…But I don’t know how much help I can be.” Val said through his teeth trying to control the pain, “This changes everything, don’t you see?”
Timor nodded his head, “I know.”
“Really, we do not even need to find what happened on that ship…We do not need to bang our heads anymore. They already know what happened. That’s why they are covering it up. I just wish you told me this earlier.”
“I’m so sorry…”
“That’s okay, you are a good kid…you meant no harm.”
“So do you still think we need to look for the doctor?”
“Yes, we need him to answer other questions…remember why I told you I was also sent here?”
“Chief, there is something else…” Timor thought to tell him about the call he received from the Capitan feeling very awkward of holding out on that information. He wanted to warn him. He wanted to come clean and tell him everything.
“We’ll talk about this later. You better go and take that shower…” Val interrupted before he could say anything else as he heard Mikka already opening the front door.
Moments later, she walked in front of them carrying in one hand a huge black bag. Her suite had a blood on it, and as she took out her sword, its blade told the other part of the story.
“You were right. It is a humanoid after all,” Mikka seemed not in the mood at all. “Now that we have that android, let’s find that doctor.”
“Good, you got him, but…I can work on it, it can tell us a lot. But I have to be able to move…” Val said through cramps of pain staring at Mikka.
“Okay, okay…” She said reluctantly.
“You can use my recuperation tube.” She continued as she pressed her palm on her commode unlocking it. Then she turned it upside down, revealing to their biggest surprise the long, green tube in the middle of it.
“That should work for you…Much better than any pills. I’ll give you an hour in there. But you better not try any funny business when you feel better. We have a deal, remember?”
“What is that?” Timor whispering, disbelieving voice Val could hair in the background.
“Yes, yes, of course we do. If you have done this before, it would have saved us a lot of time…” Then he looked at Timor and said “You’ll see.”
“It’s really not my job to keep on saving your life.” Mikka reminded him.
The pain Val felt was so great that he could not even get to the bed if not for Mikka’s help. But in fifteen minutes of being submerged in transparent liquid with hundreds of electrons zooming over his entire body, he was feeling already so much better. So much better that he finally fell asleep.
Mikka stood there, next to him, staring at his body…And memories again came back uninvited…
She was 9 years old. 20 years have passed by already, but it was like the scene was happening to her that very second.
She remembered the smell of bacon being fried in her home. Seconds later, her mom would put on the eggs and call her to come downstairs to eat. She was ready for the school; the homework was all done the night before; her hair was all fixed up; the school uniform was clean and ironed. She had nothing to worry about.
Before her mom could call again, she ran downstairs, jumping happily two stairs at a time. Everything was perfect. Except she never got to have that breakfast.
Two men broke through the back door before she could finish with the last of the stairs.
They were dressed in dark blue suites, each holding two guns in their hands.
Not even a second later, she saw her mom, the woman whose only job seemed to have been to cook breakfast and dinner for her, landed her kitchen knife right in the throat of the closest intruder.
Seconds later she threw herself down, dodging a swarm of bullet that ricocheted behind her. The second man tried to follow her mom's body with his guns, but she was just too fast for him, and her hands were already on his. She used the inertia of her jump to spin around his whole body and throw him away, with his head going through the kitchen window where it got permanently stuck, blood sipping through his broken head. He slapped like a dying fish on the dock before life left him.
However, the third intruder, the one that came behind the first two, didn't fail, and the bullet he fired took her mom three feet backward causing the huge stream of blood to start gashing from her chest.
She looked at her daughter and Mikka saw desperation turn into a horrifying fear in those beautiful sky-blue eyes of her mother.
“Run!” she screamed, "Now!' It was in her mom's tone of voice she knew she had to obey. Yet run she just could not. She could not even move.
….
Mikka looked at the man lying inside th
e recuperation tube. The hair looked more grey then she remembered. But thick eyebrows, strong cheek, crooked nose all looked just the same. It was him all right, she was sure. The timer said 15 more minutes. She poured herself another glass of a local ale and set back next to the tube.
....
Her thoughts traveled back again, back to the same moment, to her childhood home, kitchen. Again, it was more than just a memory. It seemed so real, so powerful, like she was there…She could smell the same fresh morning air coming through the broken kitchen door trying to rid the kitchen of the air dominated by a burning bacon. Early spring with flowers outside the kitchen floor just starting to show off. She suddenly remembered everything, clearly. It all came back to her, her mom’s blood covering the floor, the smallest of the details that she thought didn’t exist, the black fancy shoes of the man that came to her.
She remembered the man, unlike two that were covered completely in black, step over her. His face was ugly, all scared up. She thought he looked like what evil was supposed to look like.
“'I need you to tell me where the box is." She remembered, for the first time, what he said to her. She even remembered the stench of garlic on his breath. No wonder she hated it her whole life.
But instead of fear, Mikka suddenly felt rage, uncontrolled rage, the one she spent better part of her last twenty years to overcome.
She moved forward. But the ugly intruder recognized the look of defiance on her face. He instinctively took a half a step back and pointed his black, metallic gun right to her forehead.
“You tell me, and it can be all over.” He said as his eyes examined every atom of her face.
His last words were..."I guess you do not know anything.”
But before he could fire a bullet that would end Mikka's existence, something struck him right between his eyes, something that caused a little red dot to appear, blood to start pouring out, and his whole body to collapse like there was never ever any life in it at all.
She turned around to see a man walking in their kitchen from the front door, holding the smallest gun she ever saw. its barrel wasn’t longer than her smallest finger.
The man breathed heavily like he was out of air, but his hand was steady, still pointing forward. His face, thin, unshaved, with deep lines she recently remembered all too well.
“What was in the box?” Mikka asked suddenly as Val’s head came out of the tube.
Val looked at her, and decided to look away.
“Thank you, thank you for this.” He said surprised at how good he felt. Six hundred years ago, I used this every week. Why did we give that up too?
“I was nine. You saved my life, killed the man who killed my mom…I sometimes wondered if you were real or not, if it was all just a dream. But now I know… I remember everything. You aged a bit...hmh, maybe in the good way”. She continued to talk as she walked to get him a towel.
“You saved my life back then, and then you took me to an orphanage, Mother Tlira Convent. Remember?”
“Of course I remember,” Val finally answered with his attention going back to android or whatever was left of it. “And it seems I have not made a mistake. A good, decent human being you have become, haven't you?”
“Yeah, I know. ” Mikka was suddenly cold splashed with his words. “But if I have not, you would most likely be dead right now. Those officers seem to have been tailing you and would have finished the job.” She said in a way excusing her career and what she has become. “So what was in the box?”
Val shrugged his shoulders.
“Do you remember what you constantly asking me as I took you to a Mother Tlira Convent?”
“I was asking you about my father..”
“Well, have your father finally showed up? I could not find him myself. Maybe he can answer that for you.”
“Yes, he showed up in the end. It took him a good few years though, and better than he did not...”
“So, the next time you run into him, why not ask him about the box? How would I know of any box?”
“I bet you do. Why were you there in the first place?”
“Just talk to your father. He can explain everything I can’t.”
“I had no contact with him since he took me to Master Zill. He never returned for me, never even contacted me…I really would like to know why.”
“Look, we are all full of secrets…Some are so dark we ourselves do not even want to be aware of them. Some are so sweet we just rather keep them inside, just for ourselves, to linger in our mind, like a favorite candy rolled inside a mouth.”
Val gave her a long look. “Your father’s secrets I do not know…But I bet, there are a lot of them. And once you get to know them, I bet you would understand him, understand the things he did and why he did them…”
“You know, I have forgotten all about the box, about the assassin, the way he looked, until right now...I mean I wondered why my mom was killed, what brought those people in my home, why things happened the way they did. But I was really never able to remember it all.”
“You felt so bad about what they did back there, to you, to your mother, that you became assassin yourself, just like them?”
“Shut up old man. Don’t make me regret I helped you.”
“That is what a tube does, you know?” Val tried a softer approach. “It doesn’t only heal your body. The more you use it, your memories of things past returns, some which we do not want to remember.”
“So what was in the box?”
“I was actually there by accident…” Val said after a long pause, “I do not even know what box you are talking about.”
“Spaceshit! You are laying! What accident?”
“I was tracking down the guy who killed your mother…He had some questions that needed answering.”
“Yeah, you have a funny way of asking questions.”
“Did you ever find out what clan those assassins were from?” Val said paying no attention to her disbelieving him, continued his word-idea-planting game. “Maybe it is the same one-“
“No. no, I never did,” She interrupted him, not ready to hear his thoughts. “ I wanted to, but…Maybe I can do it now…Things always seem to get in a way, and I really never took out the time. But now, after I finish this, I will have enough time.”
“That’s how it is…At first they keep you busy by making you work harder than you can… You are so tired that you can’t even think straight…they say that some people who go to clans go there to forget their pasts…by the time they finish their training, they even forget that they were trying to forget something.”
“Yeah, isn’t that right. But I do not belong to no clan.”
“Whatever you say…Look, when this is all over, and if it goes as well as it should, I’ll tell you everything I know. Maybe that can help. Maybe I can help.”
Chapter 11 The Humanoid
“Do any of you two know much about humanoids?” Timor interrupted their conversation suddenly, “Unfortunately, they got forbidden a way before I was born. Never even knew they were still around.”
“You are such a virgin, young and innocent” Mikka said making Timor blush all over.
“Of course I know about androids,” Val said, “I had like 100’s of them…Good that you got his whole body. Some would think that all the answers are inside their heads, but that is not so…I need to examine its entire body to find out where the switch is, how it works.
“I’ll start with his neck…You see, underneath his armpit…those little dots…they are part of a lock. If you press them in the exact order, it is supposed to open the head.” Val was explaining as he stared at the head of a humanoid which still had the same color as if it was still alive. But eyes were closed. And lines on the face look unnaturally relaxed. It looked so real, yet so dead.
“One more thing that we should have never got rid of…” Val’s thoughts came out loud as he remembered how really useful those humanoids really were. He lost count of how many he actually had d
uring his lifetime.
“That may take you like a million of combinations to get it open. You gonna get really, really old trying to open that head.” Mikka seemed not to like the idea very much of spending time on the humanoid.
“And while you play with that thing, what do you want us to do in the meantime?” Timor was ready to contribute something, anything.
“Okay…You see, there are a lot of ways to find a person.”
“You mean like an installed tracker, DNA scans, mind Pattern scans, like that?”
“Well, if you are referring to those...there was, a long way ago, another way we could use to track a person, but anyway, that way is not used anymore, and, and I was really not even referring to that...” Val sounded mysterious.
“But what I actually meant to say is that it’s all about finding patterns.” Val was telling then as he stood above the droid, feeling strange, but the pain seemed absent at last.
“We can get data at all his moving around patterns during the last 20, 30 years. The place where he is right now is probably the place he had visited number of times during the last 30 years.”
“Unless he switched on his humanoid with his tracking ID and never had him go places where he was…during the last 30 years.”
“That’s right…humanoid would not go to the same place where he would. Otherwise it would beat the purpose…So let’s look at the places where he suddenly stopped going. Why sent android to his favorite restaurant, to his mistress, to a walk in a favorite park? We have to assume that he had tracking ID on his own body sometimes during the past…and we could extend tracking to 40 or 50 years if we do not find anything.”
“But I think it will be much more recent. Do you notice this timeline here, how after 45th, he stopped publishing so many new papers? He used to go to four or five conventions a year, and in the last 10 years, that seemed to have all but disappear…”
“Yes, Timor, you are right. I agree that may be our best option to start with. The only thing is, my access to private date seemed to be cut. My pod is not working and you burned all my implants.”