Radical-9

CHAPTER 30: Radical-9

February 25^th, 2022

5:23 am

Back in the hallway and we've lost all of our light again, but I've found that by spamming the “Find Friend” button is constantly brings the arrow back out, and even if it is going the opposite way as us it does provide for some temporary light. We're on the opposite side of the hallway we had first been in, and like the other side there is a matching staircase leading upwards just like there had been before.

“Now, let's see if this door doesn't make me want to rip my hair out,” I say.

“Let's hope not, I like your hair,” she says.

“Why thank you,” I say.

We head up the stairs, and I take a breath of relief as the door stays put. Just as doors should. Stupid things need to know their place. I walk up to it and grab on the handle, it swings open effortlessly.

“Hey, isn't it odd you didn't need to open the prompt there like normal?”

“Huh?”

“That opened like a normal door,”

“Oh, yeah. That is a bit odd. It seems to be a running trend with this floor,” I say. I walk inside and turn around as I do, I see about a dozen computers lined up one after another on desks. All of them but one are smashed and broken. It looks like the inside of an office, black and white tiled floors line the way before us. “...and speaking of things being odd...”

I walk forward and kneel down before one of the computer screens. I turn on the monitor and the screen remains mainly black except for a single line of green text, “Radical-9.” Pressing “Enter” brings up two separate folders, “Parents” and “Children.”

“Hey, come over and take a look at this, I think I remember Jen saying something about this stuff, Radical-9?”

Lindsey walks over, looking over my shoulder, “Huh, yeah. I remember the name, not what she said about it.”

I click first on the “Parents” folder, more texts pops up, this time looking more like a graph.

“Woah...this...I think this is listing all of the people involved with this?” I ask.

“Involved? How do you mean involved?”

“I don't know, maybe all of the scientists? This up here shows all the keywords related to these names,” I say, pointing it out.

radical-9, genetic, infected, lantrate, dicoberene.

“It looks like near gibberish to me,” she says.

“How convenient that any info on Jack is bringing up an error,” I say.

“Yeah, right? Well, there's that Jay guy Jen spoke about,” she points right below Jack's name. “And right there is...your father,” she says.

“Yeah.”

“I'm sorry,” she says.

I take in a deep breath. It's one thing to think about what he's done, but it is another to see his name up here and the word “DECEASED” right next to it.

“Wait...why is my mom's name here? Right down there, Elena Cress,” I say.

“Something happen in 2008? It seems to be the common denominator here,” she asks.

“2008...I was only like...four years old,” I say.

“Anything you can remember at all?”

“No.”

“Then why would she be under surveillance by the scientists your dad worked for?”

“Maybe it has something to do with this infection it says up here?”

“I don't know.”

“I've got nothing on the other names,” I say.

“Wasn't there another folder?”

“Uh, yeah, one second.” I back out of the “Parents” folder and select the “Children” folder this time, a similarly laid out screen appears before our eyes. I can almost feel my heart sink in my chest once the text hits the screen.

“

“Okay, okay, calm down now,” Lindsey says, putting her hand on my shoulder.

“It says I'm in here, in Elysium. How does it know that? How can it tell where I am?!” I ask, banging my fists down on the desk.

“I don't know, but it doesn't seem that you're the only one,” she says, pointing to a name a little further down. “JENNIFER ADATA.”

“What...?”

“You said it yourself that she was adopted. Tell me, did you know her birth father?” Lindsey asks.

“I didn't, I never bothered to ask. Jesus...”

“That means she and Sam are related, he's on here too,” she says.

I take another look.

“Lindsey...”

“Yeah?”

“We need to move, now.”

“Why?”

“Take another look at Sam's current status,” I say, standing up.

DECEASED.

“Oh god...that can't be true,” she says.

“I don't know if it is or not, but we need to move, now.”

I hop into a jog and we begin to the other side of the room, it is symmetrical and has a door that leads back down outside on each side. In the middle just past the desks are five steps that lead up to a glass elevator.

This just keeps on getting weirder and weirder.

There's a monitor on the left side of the elevator, of which has a single button on the touch screen, a simple “UP.” Lindsey presses it and the elevator door slides open with a mechanical WHING. I see that it is completely dark behind the door, we both step in, standing inside of the darkness as the doors close behind us.

The elevator hums as it begins to ascend. We must be at least halfway up the giant ship by now. It begins to slow down and then it pulls to a stop. I hear a thump on the glass, it is opaque so I cannot see through it. Lindsey and I both look at each other, waiting for the other to provide an answer to the sound. The elevator door doesn't seem to open, not on its own, anyway. I take out Flintlocke and Lindsey looks at me with concern.

“Don't worry, if the doors are working like normal, then this theory should prove true that maybe the glass is working like normal also.”

I take a shot and the bullet penetrates the glass, it shatters and falls below, I can see a bulky set of red armor propped up against where the glass was, and he falls inside the elevator. The bullet, however, catches inside the flesh of the creature that had pinned him up against said elevator, the creature that we ourselves had faced downstairs. It bends backward as its hands reach up to its eye. I fire off two more shots and the creature falls, melting like its brethren.

“You okay there?” I ask, looking down at Klein, who is breathing harder than I'd ever seen him. I reach my arm down and help him to his feet.

“Holy fuck, you guys showed up at the perfect time,” he says.

“Yeah, we sure did, what happened to you all?” Lindsey asks. “And where are Sam and Jen?”

“I lost track of the other two when we all got sucked up. I heard that stupid ship and it woke me up, so I went to go check up on it and the stupid thing was taking half the damn house away! I think they might've gotten sucked into a different part of the ship than I.”

“We woke up not long after, you guys were already sucked up when we had,” Lindsey says.

“Right.”

“We need to hurry fast, though. We have reason to believe that Jen and Sam are in danger,” I say.

“What kind of reason?”

“Enough to say that if we stop and explain it could already be too late,” I say, hopping out of the elevator. “Come on, let's go!”

“Fair enough,” he says, joining in.

“Ha, the old trio getting back to what we do best, kicking ass and taking names,” Lindsey says.

The room Klein had been fighting in is a large kitchen, everything is either beige or white, it almost hurts to look at. Pots and pans are scattered around the floor, but I'm confident that they were never even placed in any of these cupboards in the first place. As we run through everything seems to blank out for just a moment, a hiccup in the game's visuals if anything.

No, not just a hiccup, something is happening. Something inside this game is going haywire and it is driving this part of the game insane.

Jay.

Jen had said that he was going to attempt to hack his way in, this might just be him succeeding at that. Let's just hope he knows the difference between restoring the log out button and the kill switch.