I wandered the halls of the A.X.A Testing Facility, unknowing of how to feel. It'd been four hours since Garren's surgery was finished, and two ever since Kyra came back from her meeting with the General.
She spilled everything to Cynthia and I.
The Controllant, the memories, and the manipulation on Garren's mind, was all revealed to us by Kyra. We'd been bestowed the horrible truth.
She explained how the General spoke of it in such high regard, almost referring to Garren like a tragic hero to their research. But with that context, it made me question 'why'?
Why was the hero of the story laying mutilated in bed to a comatose state?
How could anyone bear causing this much harm to an already broken mind?
Garren was a victim. That's all I could think about. Garren was a victim to the A.X.A. higher-ups that we were so strictly expected to honor.
The taste left on my tongue was bitter.
"Fuck!!!" I slammed a wall, outputting my rage. "Why? Why?!"
I didn't know what to think. I didn't know how to go about accepting this.
All my time working in A.X.A., I'd turned a blind eye to many questionable things. But this time, I couldn't. It was impossible.
"Garren was innocent… Why…?"
Why? That's all I could ask. Why?
"Why…? How could you do that to him…?"
I thought of the General's face, and the imagination angered me. All of my respect for him had been thrown away in an instant. Same to Cynthia, and especially same to Kyra. She was fuming when she'd returned to us from the meeting.
"Fuck him. Fuck the General," she'd said. Those words alone said enough about what he'd done.
As I walked through the halls, I thought about A.X.A.'s true intentions. What were they going for in making thousands of Controllants? Who else would they be using it on?
Why did they want to control the Sin of Discrimination?
Here I was, questioning everything due to my naivety. I'd been oblivious to the bigger picture A.X.A. was truly trying to create. Even now, I was clueless.
I passed by numerous rooms purposed for all kinds of things. Being a testing facility, every room in the building had something going on. People were inside every single one, as I could hear discussion, tapping, and the use of tools through each and every door. Then there was one, single, quiet room I stopped at.
[ Morgue ]
—The door label had read.
I didn't know what it was, but the silence emanating from the room intrigued me, even while knowing what was on the other side. I'd been hearing too much noise all day, both outside and inside my head. Even until now, my head was constantly ringing with questions of the unknown. I imagined the quietness that came with death that those who lay inside the room experienced.
I wondered what it was like, to hear nothing but silence away from the questions in my head.
I opened the door and entered, coming face-to-face with the smell of dozens of corpses, and the sight of shelves upon shelves of labelled body lockers. At first, I regretted my decision immediately, "What the hell am I doing here…?"
But then, a particular shelf near the back caught my eye. The labels were colored differently, with yellow rather than white. Already lost in the thoughts of my mind, I wandered forward unknowingly. As I got closer to the labels, I saw titles that were all too familiar.
[ Kessel Siroca | Sixth ]
[ Winston Hughensburg | Ninth ]
[ Daniel Buro | Tenth ]
I'd found the corpses of my fallen comrades from the battle of Invidan, and I realized I'd never really been able to confront them ever since that war. It was partially from sorrow, paired with the guilt I bore in my inability to do more on that day.
I had a sudden double take.
[ Daniel Buro | Tenth ]
I read the label, my mouth hanging open.
"Tenth…?"
I recalled what the General had said about him following our victory against Invidan:
"He ran. He disconnected from the hive mind and ran away. Left everything behind: you guys, his Angels, his belongings in his dorm, the military. He left the building and never turned back."
That's what the General had said. The General had told us that Tenth abandoned the war and ran away, never turning back. So now I was wondering why his name was on the label of a corpse locker in a morgue.
"You died too…?"
I further read the label. The date listed for Tenth's death was the same day we had the battle against Invidan. I then read Sixth and Ninth's labels, and as expected, their day of death was the same day too.
But how did Tenth die the same day that he ran away? That's the question I wondered now.
Unsure whether to be unsettled or frantic, I searched the documents and records stashed in the paper shelves of the morgue. I flipped through files and pages before I found a section listed under the same day the three of them died. When I opened the record, I began reading through the deaths listed on that date, and the details regarding them. As I searched for my comrades' names, I recalled how the General had described their deaths.
Sixth had his brain fried by the hive mind in an instantaneous burst of excitement and fear.
Ninth died to cardiac arrest by experiencing a hundred of his Angels' deaths, through their perspectives, all in one instance.
And Tenth wasn't ever even described to have died.
When I first came across Sixth's listed record, I expected to read what I'd believed all this time. Instead, I was shown the following words:
[ Death by fractured neck ]
"What?" I re-read the words carefully, because they were clearly not akin to those of the General's.
I quickly flipped some more pages over, and soon came across Ninth's record.
[ Death by fractured neck ]
It said the exact same thing. I was speechless this time, as I remember the General clearly stating two different ways that Sixth and Ninth had died, and neither of them were due to a neck injury. But according to the official records in my hands, they died this way. The same way.
Lastly, out of alarming curiosity, I flipped pages until I found Tenth's record. It was a listing I didn't even think would have existed considering my belief he'd simply ran away back then. Then, I read the details.
[ Death by fractured neck ]
I was dumbfounded. "Is this a mistake?" I flipped to other random pages in the book to look at the ways others have died, and they were all different. But these three—Sixth, Ninth, and Tenth—had all apparently died the same way. They all died to a fractured neck.
I didn't know what to make of this, of these revelations. All I knew was that either my head wasn't in the right place, or that things going on around me weren't right. But the statements were there, officially documented and signed.
"What is going on…?"
Something wasn't right. My three comrades had left, but not in the ways I'd been told. I realized one absolute thing for sure.
I had been deceived, again.