Gundam Wing Fan Fiction ❯ The Palace of Justice ❯ 3 ( Chapter 3 )
[ Y - Young Adult: Not suitable for readers under 16 ]
By: Lethanon 
Anime/Manga: Gundam Wing Fan Fiction | Genre(s): Romance / Sci-fi / Thriller | Type: Continuation | Uploaded On: 01.14.2011 | Pages: 4 | Words: 5.6K | Visits: 390 | Status: Work In Progress
Anime/Manga: Gundam Wing Fan Fiction | Genre(s): Romance / Sci-fi / Thriller | Type: Continuation | Uploaded On: 01.14.2011 | Pages: 4 | Words: 5.6K | Visits: 390 | Status: Work In Progress
3:
Trowa sat up so fast his head spun, or the room did...something was definitely spinning. It took a few turns to convince himself he needed to look down, so he did that, leaning over, resting his hands on his knees as he took deep breaths and struggled to keep his juice down. It had, after all, been good juice, and the floor looked exceptionally shiny. Not at all like something he should puke on. That didn’t mean not puking was easy.
The hand on his back rubbed in small circles that only emphasized the spinning of the room and he side stepped away, turning his head to glare and regretting it instantly as he stumbled several steps more than he had intended to take, right into the wall. But walls were good for sliding down, so your ass was on the floor and you could hang your head properly and grab it at the same time. He cradled his mind and prayed for the spinning to end. He’d never had a hangover like this, had always been pretty tolerant of alcohol, but then he didn’t remember drinking anything other than juice, and that had been a while ago. Good juice too! Not funky juice.
“It takes the body several tries to adjust, and some still never get used to it. Your molecular structure needs to solidify itself again.”
His what now? Trowa was sure that made no sense whatsoever and he lifted his head, leaning it against the wall in the hope that would at least provide some relief from the spinning and stared steadfastly at the only other thing in the room. A person, which was good because the person had spoken and if it had been a cow that would have just been awkward.
“You...” The same voice he had heard overlapping Heero and Duo, as they faded and it took precedence.
“Who are you?”
“I already told you. I’m Nataku.”
“Funny, I’ve heard that name before.” So many times, screamed in battle, or cried in sleep, or whispered in confusion as a boy struggled to become a man. No one had told him where Wufei was and his stomach dropped, but the person in front of him had certain things Wufei had never had. Like breasts, for starters.
“Like the warrior goddess?”
“Something like that,” she agreed, coming over to help him up. “You should feel much better in a few hours. In the meantime, I can show you your room.”
He didn’t bother arguing because usually when you had your own room you also had your own bed and right then a bed sounded like the bees knees to Trowa. Though he wasn’t really sure if Bees even had knees. He focussed on this strange idea and the liquid feeling in his knees slowly faded. His stomach protested walking, but his vision steadied and he contemplated Bee anatomy as they walked in silence all the way to His Room.
His. Room. It was...roomy. And apparently his. It was also very, very white. The door was a strange affair, there one minute and gone the next, and when he walked inside it suddenly reappeared with him on the inside of it and Nataku on the out. He didn’t even bother trying to unlock it; it didn’t have a door handle, or even any substance at all that he could tell. It looked almost like a holograph, only he couldn’t see through it and his stomach was still awol enough that he wasn’t willing to risk stepping into the strange almost-holographic and likely somehow booby trapped door.
Instead he focussed on his room. It was simple, with a wide screen across one wall connected to what looked like a computer, though he couldn’t be sure. A small desk to one side with chair, a large and comfortable looking bed and a door leading into a nicely sized bathroom. It was completely liveable, and damn near glowed in the dark with how white and clean it was. Trowa sighed and went to lay down.
He stared at the ceiling, hands folded neatly over his stomach, which as promised was starting to feel much better now that the room wasn’t spinning in circles. He wasn’t convinced, now that he could think straight, that it hadn’t been the room spinning. Everything had been so white, and silent, but that didn’t mean the room couldn’t spin.
He felt the odd desire to talk to himself, but wasn’t sure the room wasn’t bugged, and if that was a computer and he used it, they would no doubt record everything he looked at. But the longer he lay there, the more certain facts turned to truth and he had to accept them.
One, he had been abducted. Possibly, he was beginning to suspect, transported like in one of those tacky science fiction shows Duo loved to watch, from one place to another. Hence why his body needed to remember its molecular structure. He hoped it had a damn good memory. Or that it made him look like a wet dream on crack.
Two, Heero was going to kill him. Whenever he found him. And when he was done Duo was going to do horrible things with his body. They would be worried, because Une was going to have their heads for losing him. And then Quatre would swear.
Three, the only human contact, if it was even human, he had available to him shared an eerily familiar name, connected to the only person from his old life who hadn’t contacted him in the last few days. And Trowa did not believe in coincidences.
Four. He was pretty sure he was inside Frank, and he was a little disturbed as to whether that technically meant he had been eaten by Frank, and was yet to be regurgitated, or broken down in stomach acid. He blamed Duo entirely for humanising Frank.
After what he thought might have been hours, but suspected was not quite so long, Trowa gave in and went to the computer. He tapped the screen and it came to life.
“Touch. Nice.” Not even Preventers had a screen like this. Maybe he should work for Frank, and send a Christmas card to Duo comparing office cubicles each year just to make him jealous? He shook his head and grabbed the seat from the desk, pulling it over to sit in the middle of the room, staring up at the screen and reaching out to tap, at least a metre away from the wall, at thin air.
The computer responded and he whistled low. A collection of icons appeared and he tapped ‘location’. A four way screen came up, each with a heading laid over the image below. ‘Map Ship’, ‘Video Ship’, ‘Map external’ and ‘Video external’. He stared at the options, shrugged and went for Map Ship.
He was a very small blinking light in the far corner of a massive warren of disturbingness. He drank it all in, memorising as much of it as he could before realising he was looking at Level 4 of Sector 96. That didn’t make him feel any better about the miniscule size of His Room and its tony blinking dot. Size didn’t matter, it was true, unless you suspected you were kidnapped and being held prisoner on a giant disappearing space station.
Giant didn’t begin to describe it. Duo was right; Frank was a monster. He went for Video Ship and the image changed into a shot of his front door. From the other side.
“That’s handy...” He experimented a little and found he could ‘wander’; using his fingers to walk down the corridor, a camera following his every move. He wandered eight corridors before he saw another person, and they looked so entirely uninteresting that he gave up and went for Map external.
Unfortunately, that took him to a map of the universe. The one they were in, at any rate, which was Home, but the inscriptions on the outer edges listed nearby universes as if they were places they might possibly go. As if they were places they could have been right now. He hurriedly switched to Video External and spun in a wide circle before spotting, some distance away, the tiny dot that was the space craft Heero and Duo were on. He zoomed in until he could see through the windows of the hull and the lump in his throat made his chest ache.
So close, but so far. They were arguing, faces flushed but somehow stoic. They were all in so much trouble, and they didn’t have know the half of it. For that matter, neither did Trowa and he was the one sitting in His new shiny Room inside Frank, spying on them.
He exited the viewing options with a heavy sigh, looking at the other options with a small frown, not knowing what half of them even were, amused that there was an option for food delivery, and instead chose ‘communication’.
There was a query box asking for the number and he slumped in his seat. Was he supposed to punch in the number of the room he wanted to call? He had no idea but when he pulled up the number pad he smirked and typed in 37265. Two option buttons appeared; call and leave a message. He went for leave a message and the screen came up blank. He stared at it for a very long time.
“Well that’s weird.”
The words appeared on the screen and he bit his lip in annoyance. Of course, it would be voice activated. What on Frank wasn’t state of the art, after all, and made for your convenience. The lock on the door, obviously. If there was a lock on the door.
“You get used to the re-molecularization.”
He damn near fell off his chair. He stared at the words printed under his own on the screen and took several deep breaths, reminding himself he was a goddamned Gundam pilot and he didn’t freak out over talking computers. Often. Or something.
“Frank?”
“Yes?”
He was talking to Frank. Or something pretending to be Frank. Or maybe there was just some random person on board of floating black box Frank, who happened to actually be named Frank? Why didn’t this thing have a phone book, and an instruction manual for that matter?
“Why did you kidnap me?”
“I didn’t. I sent you an invitation. You came.”
He did what now? Trowa vaguely remembered the timings that no one else had spotted. Had Frank known they would be stuck, and call him? He was listed under ‘problem solving’ on the Preventers database. He’d assumed it was some strange joke of Yuy’s but maybe not. Had Frank seen it and gone and blown up a satellite, killed three of Quatre’s men and lured them in by waiting in that same spot just to invite him on board?
That seemed a little farfetched. It definitely made him frown.
“I don’t remember getting anything in the mail.”
There was a long pause. It was impossible to say if Frank was considering an adequate response, or had run off to use the loo. Trowa was in no position to do anything but wait either way.
“I apologise. The mailman wouldn’t collect my consignment.”
And it had a sense of humour. Wasn’t that just charming. It made Trowa want to punch it in the face and strangle it until it gave him all the answers he wanted, but he wasn’t even sure if he was talking to black box Frank or Frank the man down a few levels who ran off to use the loo and was just screwing with him because he was bored.
He took a few more calming breaths and made a mental note to take up meditation for real. Wufei had always said it was good for you, but Trowa had never seen the point. How could he possibly get any more calm? Duo had suggested meditation might be bad for his health; that if he relaxed any more his heart might stop. Trowa hadn’t been disinclined to believe him, at the time.
“Why am I here, Frank?”
“I don’t know.”
Well that was great. Trowa sighed and fiddled with the ends of his hair where they hung near his jaw, wondering what to do next.
“Am I a prisoner here?”
“No?”
Frank actually sounded confused. It was emotion enough that Trowa sat up and stared at the word on the screen and analysed the little question mark as if it might tell him something. It didn’t, of course, but it at least made him feel as if he was doing something.
“You just push at the door and it will open.”
What? Trowa turned in his chair and made a pushing motion at the door and sure enough it opened. He slumped over the back of the chair and groaned softly because none of this made any sense whatsoever, but he sure as hell wasn’t going to sit there talking to Frank, which he could do anytime, supposedly, when he could go and explore.
“Have fun, Trowa Barton.”
It grated, but Trowa ignored the computer and left His Room. It exited into a long white corridor and headed right, recalling the map he had seen and manoeuvring his way through the warren of corridors filled with doors just like his, each perfectly silent until finally he started passing people.
He sighed again. It was going to be impossible to fit in here. At first it was the clothing; he was in a Preventers jacket, a simple grey turtleneck and jeans. Everyone else was in the same, too-bright white dress looking thing. None of their shoes squeaked on the squeaky floor, but Trowa’s Prevention issue steel capped monstrosities did. He was beginning to realise why Heero had liked those horrendous yellow sneakers back in the day.
They were all Asian. That was a problem right there, and explained what they were wearing at the same time. The problem was that he wasn’t Asian, and not only was his hair too light, his skin too pale, his eyes too green and his clothing all wrong, but he was a good head taller than the tallest person he passed, and much taller than a lot of others. He could hear Frank chuckling in the back of his mind and wasn’t entirely certain it was his imagination.
The corridors eventually opened up into what looked like a station and he went over to stare at the board and scratch his cheek when his hair tickled and annoyed him, having absolutely no clue what to do. So when the shuttle pulled up he got on and took a seat.
A small boy was sitting across from him, staring at him with wide chocolate brown eyes. His hair was cut in a neat bowl around his head and his dress seemed a little big for him. He’d grow into it in no time, or so Trowa was sure his mother had assured him. Hopefully the kid would also grow into its eyes, which were like little saucers in its face about ready to fall out as he stared at Trowa.
Trowa didn’t respond at all, just stared at him and the kid eventually shifted uncomfortably and tucked itself in against its mother’s side. Strangely, scaring an infant felt good and left Trowa feeling a little less lost when the shuttle pulled up and he got out.
Only to be completely lost again. He had no real idea where he was. A shrine maybe? There was incense and bells and people coming and going down huge steps and he hurried after them, climbing the stairs and looking back, seeing the shuttle, but also beyond it, to parklands and pools and fountains, all of it sheltered by a white ceiling. It was strange and left Trowa feeling small and insignificant. He sighed and went into the shrine.
It was quiet inside, no one speaking. There was a line of people at the front waiting to light candles, and still more waiting to collect a fortune stick. There were others simply kneeling and praying, their faces upturned or downcast, lips moving without sound in an image that finally seemed natural to Trowa. These were people after all. Human, regardless of where they lived.
He leant against a wall in the back corner and simply watched them come and go, letting the calm wash over and reorient him, needing the mask to fall back into place. After a time, someone came to stand beside him, not in prayer like so many others, but just as still and observant.
“We don’t usually see people from the other sectors here.”
That caught Trowa’s attention and he looked down at the monk curiously. He wasn’t in white; was wearing traditional orange and it finally made Trowa smile.
“I’m...new, I guess. Still pretty confused about how everything works. But my room is in Sector 96.”
The man looked surprised, and then shrugged the curiosity away.
“Well, I would have assumed you were from the lower sectors. The twenties perhaps, but if this is where you want to be, who am I to argue?” The monk smiled, bowed slightly and drifted off to talk to others, or pray, or whatever monks did. Trowa watched him go and then hurried back to the shuttle.
Lower sectors. So he was high in the ship. He studied the shuttle map and got on what he hoped was the right one, taking a seat and trying to memorise the map he had seen and the numbers on it. He wondered if they gave out print outs of the shuttle system...that would be handy. He doubted it, simply because it would have made his life easier.
The shuttle went down and he found the small feeling of triumph in his gut ridiculous. He used to decimate military bases, and now he got excited about catching the bus. He didn’t get off at the first few stops, or any of the others that followed. He did change at an interchange after staring at one of the maps for a very long time and deciding he had to switch there, even though he really had no idea what he was doing. The map made no sense to him whatsoever, mostly because he had no idea what Sector or Level he wanted to be on, and neither seemed to be laid out in a way that was to be understood.
Eventually he found himself on Level 2, sector 29. He had no idea what that meant, except that the people here were dressed in white suits instead of dresses, were of his height or taller and all looked of European decent. He wondered why he hadn’t been housed in this sector, instead of being somewhere he stood out so much, but then maybe the idea was to make sure he didn’t blend in? Which didn’t make a whole lot of sense when he could move around freely and go somewhere he could blend in whenever he wanted.
Which made him wonder if he was carrying a tracking device. He sighed, having not thought about it, because he was almost sure no time had lapsed, but he wasn’t convinced he hadn’t been unconscious at some point they first transferred him into Frank. And who was to say the transfer itself hadn’t altered him in some way? He had no way of knowing and wished the others had at least received an invitation to come on board as well. Yuy would have been able to figure out the damn computer at least, though he might have destroyed it in the process.
The annoying thing was that it was becoming increasingly clear that his only real source of concrete information was the people around him, or Frank. If he asked the people around him there was a chance they would realise he was a stranger and possibly not supposed to be there, which he didn’t want, but if he talked to Frank then...Frank would know what he was talking about.
He scoped the place out. He asked mundane questions, struck up useless conversations, had entire meaningless arguments, just building up what he knew of the place and its people. They were hard to anger, too understanding. They lived by routine; get up, have breakfast, go to work, go home, spend time with the family, have dinner, play on the computer, go to bed. Their lives were simple. They knew their neighbours, in fact they seemed to know almost anyone in their sector, calling out to one another and rushing to greet and then part and greet someone else. Trowa made sure he got to know a lot of people, who greeted him anew later in the day so he could remind them who he was. Someone nice, unfamiliar to the sector, and someone they could trust.
He told them all his name was Triton, the name Nataku had given him when he came on board, and no one so much as blinked or asked where he was from. He wouldn’t have known the answer anyway. Sector 96? Earth? The second star from the right? Where they hell was Frank now, anyway? Were they still parked near Duo and Heero in their small Preventer’s shuttle? Unlikely.
By the end of the day he at least thought he might have some idea of how things worked. Sort of. Socially at any rate, but he took his time catching the shuttles back, partly because he was still observing people and partly because he got lost four times.
He even found a food store, and had to pretend he had left his wallet at work and make sure the old lady who ran the store felt sorry enough for him to give him bread and milk. It was enough to learn you didn’t have money here, just a card that charged everything to your precious room, which had an account that maintained your salary and finances. He’d have to check the computer.
He was tired when he got to His Room, and went straight to the bathroom, going in to shower and making sure he was as squeaky clean as the rest of the world he’d been thrust into. When he checked the closet it was fully stocked with white towels and crisp clean white suits, all in his size. He took out a pair of brand new pyjama pants and put them on, a little amused. He couldn’t say whether they had been there before but he doubted it. He wondered if he should try and build some sort of surveillance system to install in His Room but didn’t really know where he would find an electronics store to buy the parts...people here didn’t really seem to need anything like that. Didn’t seem to need anything at all.
He ran the towel over his hair and went to rummage through the desk, finding it had been stocked with a smaller, portable computer. He went to sit in the middle of the room again and turned it on, noticing that it could link to his main computer, or work offline, and he set it to work offline by default and only connect when requested from an external source with his password. Not that he thought that would hold out the system if it was watching him, but it was worth a try.
He wrote down everything he could remember about the day, the names of all the people he had met, observations about each station he had passed, each interchange and where they led, each shuttle and the types of people who travelled on them. He made sure he recorded even the smallest of details; the scent of each woman’s perfume, how many children they had, how they parted their hair...silly, mundane things that were the difference between him being an old friend and a mystery man to be avoided. He didn’t have the luxury of being the latter.
When he was done he turned on the computer, only to find a flashing red light on the screen, labelled ‘Notices’. He clicked on it and almost laughed, shaking his head and reading through the details, recording those on his laptop as well.
‘Dear Mr Bloom, we are pleased to inform you your request to transfer into the military guard division has been approved. Please report to duty at 0600 in the morning at Level 1, Sector 1.
1’s somehow seemed exciting. He had no idea how to get there, but a map had been attached and he downloaded it to the laptop. If he got desperate he could ask the monk.
So his first concern was taken care of; he had a job. Everyone here had a job, even children. Their job was to go to school, get 100% on everything they did, and become productive members of society, and even they seemed perfectly happy with this arrangement. Trowa found it creepy; what sort of kid liked school, seriously?
He searched through the icons and found ‘Money’. He opened his account and blinked. It was set up like any online banking system, but as suspected his account number matched his room number, and his name was Triton Bloom. The bank insignia was the same one he had seen what felt like a lifetime ago, on Frank’s nose; the altered Illuminati pyramid with its closed eye and sword. That didn’t mean he thought they were a bank. It wasn’t even what really caught his attention.
He sat back in his chair and pondered the front page for a very long time, before deciding that even in Frank-land, a hundred million dollars had to be a lot of money. Enough to do anything. He was rich, and he hadn’t worked a day yet. When he went in and looked at the account details, he found the account had been opened years ago, and that a pay slip had been deposited every fortnight, gaining interest by the truckload as it all remained untouched.
So. He had money. Second concern was definitely taken care of. He wondered rather idly if he could get a monkey charged to his room, but didn’t really want to find out. Monkeys would have to draw unwanted attention and he didn’t want anyone looking into his affairs. Especially not when he couldn’t actually account for whatever his previous job had been. He’d thought it was with Preventers, but apparently not. Preventers didn’t pay this well.
The other icons were more mundane; Music, Films, Recreation, Bookings, Facilities and he even found a Help Desk and gratefully devoured the manuals he found there while he ate bread and drank milk. He was definitely getting food delivered tomorrow, and put in the order early so it would be there when he got home.
Frank, he learned, was a remarkable feat of engineering, not that he hadn’t known that before, but however the hell he worked, he did it damn well. Everything worked smoothly, and everyone was so gratingly happy Trowa almost didn’t know what to do with himself.
But he had two of three things achieved. Money to get things done, a job to build his cover, and lastly he just needed to figure out what the hell he was supposed to be doing here. Which unfortunately meant talking to Frank again.
It wasn’t that Trowa disliked Frank, because he didn’t. How could you hate an inanimate object? Unless he was talking to some guy in another sector but he didn’t think so. People here just didn’t do prank calls. It was another reason he thought they were a bit off in the head. It wasn’t even that he distrusted Frank, even though he sure as hell did. The machine had abducted him and thrust him into God didn’t even know what.
It was that Frank had a sense of humour. That was just weird. Giant disappearing colonies didn’t crack funnies.
He put in the message request and stared at the blank screen for a long time, trying to decide what to say.
“Thank you, Frank.”
The response was slow to come, as if Frank was having trouble pulling himself away from something else to talk to him. Trowa almost felt guilty, and wondered if that was the general idea.
“For what, Mister Barton?”
“Don’t you mean Mister Bloom?”
Again the long pause, as if the machine were struggling to compute his response and form an adequate response. Trowa almost wished he chose chat. Did this thing have a face as well? That would be priceless, he would have to try it later. Maybe he looked like Treize Kushrenada. Hell, maybe it was Treize. Nothing, at this point, would surprise him.
“I suppose I do.”
He supposed? How did a machine suppose?
“For my new career choice being approved. I trust my new employer has my account details to continue depositing my salary?”
“Of course, that’s done automatically when someone changes occupation.”
Of course. Trowa rolled his eyes and was just grateful that for whatever reason Frank had made him a rich man instead of a poor one. Even if it did make him wonder what Frank thought he needed that much money for.
“I searched the computer options and the help desk. The only information I could find on Military Issues was a pamphlet for school kids considering it as a career. Do we have a large military?”
“Large enough. Military is Level 1.”
“Sector 1, yes I know.”
“Level 1 only has one Sector,” Frank’s disembodied voice informed him and Trowa felt that growing sense of unease. In his whole day’s travel he never reached a ‘wall’; a place that must have been the external shell of Frank. There was always something else beyond where he was, and something else again beyond that. If the military took up an entire level of Frank, it was large. Possibly the largest force in the history of Man. It was an unpleasant thought.
“Do you know why I chose to enlist?”
“I am certain I have no idea.”
Certain. Trowa was glad someone was certain of something. He rolled his eyes and stroked the edge of his laptop, staring at the screen as if staring into a man’s face and trying to see the secrets written there, but all that was written was their conversation in black and white.
“Why is everything white?”
“Research showed white had a calming effect on people and developed trust. Humans associate it with good health and wellness.”
Fair enough, but it was in such abundance Trowa felt like a germ most of the time. Maybe it felt different once you were actually dressed in white all the time. One could hope.
He sighed, heavily, and he could almost feel Frank slipping away, focussing more on those other tasks that had seemed to have his attention from the beginning. That was fine, he only had one more question anyway.
“Frank.” Was he still there? How did you know if someone walked away from the message board? He supposed he was lucky to get immediate responses at all. What if Frank stopped checking his messages?
“Yes, Triton.”
“Why am I here?”
The pause. Again.
“I want you to save someone.”
“Who?”
No reply.
Trowa sat up so fast his head spun, or the room did...something was definitely spinning. It took a few turns to convince himself he needed to look down, so he did that, leaning over, resting his hands on his knees as he took deep breaths and struggled to keep his juice down. It had, after all, been good juice, and the floor looked exceptionally shiny. Not at all like something he should puke on. That didn’t mean not puking was easy.
The hand on his back rubbed in small circles that only emphasized the spinning of the room and he side stepped away, turning his head to glare and regretting it instantly as he stumbled several steps more than he had intended to take, right into the wall. But walls were good for sliding down, so your ass was on the floor and you could hang your head properly and grab it at the same time. He cradled his mind and prayed for the spinning to end. He’d never had a hangover like this, had always been pretty tolerant of alcohol, but then he didn’t remember drinking anything other than juice, and that had been a while ago. Good juice too! Not funky juice.
“It takes the body several tries to adjust, and some still never get used to it. Your molecular structure needs to solidify itself again.”
His what now? Trowa was sure that made no sense whatsoever and he lifted his head, leaning it against the wall in the hope that would at least provide some relief from the spinning and stared steadfastly at the only other thing in the room. A person, which was good because the person had spoken and if it had been a cow that would have just been awkward.
“You...” The same voice he had heard overlapping Heero and Duo, as they faded and it took precedence.
“Who are you?”
“I already told you. I’m Nataku.”
“Funny, I’ve heard that name before.” So many times, screamed in battle, or cried in sleep, or whispered in confusion as a boy struggled to become a man. No one had told him where Wufei was and his stomach dropped, but the person in front of him had certain things Wufei had never had. Like breasts, for starters.
“Like the warrior goddess?”
“Something like that,” she agreed, coming over to help him up. “You should feel much better in a few hours. In the meantime, I can show you your room.”
He didn’t bother arguing because usually when you had your own room you also had your own bed and right then a bed sounded like the bees knees to Trowa. Though he wasn’t really sure if Bees even had knees. He focussed on this strange idea and the liquid feeling in his knees slowly faded. His stomach protested walking, but his vision steadied and he contemplated Bee anatomy as they walked in silence all the way to His Room.
His. Room. It was...roomy. And apparently his. It was also very, very white. The door was a strange affair, there one minute and gone the next, and when he walked inside it suddenly reappeared with him on the inside of it and Nataku on the out. He didn’t even bother trying to unlock it; it didn’t have a door handle, or even any substance at all that he could tell. It looked almost like a holograph, only he couldn’t see through it and his stomach was still awol enough that he wasn’t willing to risk stepping into the strange almost-holographic and likely somehow booby trapped door.
Instead he focussed on his room. It was simple, with a wide screen across one wall connected to what looked like a computer, though he couldn’t be sure. A small desk to one side with chair, a large and comfortable looking bed and a door leading into a nicely sized bathroom. It was completely liveable, and damn near glowed in the dark with how white and clean it was. Trowa sighed and went to lay down.
He stared at the ceiling, hands folded neatly over his stomach, which as promised was starting to feel much better now that the room wasn’t spinning in circles. He wasn’t convinced, now that he could think straight, that it hadn’t been the room spinning. Everything had been so white, and silent, but that didn’t mean the room couldn’t spin.
He felt the odd desire to talk to himself, but wasn’t sure the room wasn’t bugged, and if that was a computer and he used it, they would no doubt record everything he looked at. But the longer he lay there, the more certain facts turned to truth and he had to accept them.
One, he had been abducted. Possibly, he was beginning to suspect, transported like in one of those tacky science fiction shows Duo loved to watch, from one place to another. Hence why his body needed to remember its molecular structure. He hoped it had a damn good memory. Or that it made him look like a wet dream on crack.
Two, Heero was going to kill him. Whenever he found him. And when he was done Duo was going to do horrible things with his body. They would be worried, because Une was going to have their heads for losing him. And then Quatre would swear.
Three, the only human contact, if it was even human, he had available to him shared an eerily familiar name, connected to the only person from his old life who hadn’t contacted him in the last few days. And Trowa did not believe in coincidences.
Four. He was pretty sure he was inside Frank, and he was a little disturbed as to whether that technically meant he had been eaten by Frank, and was yet to be regurgitated, or broken down in stomach acid. He blamed Duo entirely for humanising Frank.
After what he thought might have been hours, but suspected was not quite so long, Trowa gave in and went to the computer. He tapped the screen and it came to life.
“Touch. Nice.” Not even Preventers had a screen like this. Maybe he should work for Frank, and send a Christmas card to Duo comparing office cubicles each year just to make him jealous? He shook his head and grabbed the seat from the desk, pulling it over to sit in the middle of the room, staring up at the screen and reaching out to tap, at least a metre away from the wall, at thin air.
The computer responded and he whistled low. A collection of icons appeared and he tapped ‘location’. A four way screen came up, each with a heading laid over the image below. ‘Map Ship’, ‘Video Ship’, ‘Map external’ and ‘Video external’. He stared at the options, shrugged and went for Map Ship.
He was a very small blinking light in the far corner of a massive warren of disturbingness. He drank it all in, memorising as much of it as he could before realising he was looking at Level 4 of Sector 96. That didn’t make him feel any better about the miniscule size of His Room and its tony blinking dot. Size didn’t matter, it was true, unless you suspected you were kidnapped and being held prisoner on a giant disappearing space station.
Giant didn’t begin to describe it. Duo was right; Frank was a monster. He went for Video Ship and the image changed into a shot of his front door. From the other side.
“That’s handy...” He experimented a little and found he could ‘wander’; using his fingers to walk down the corridor, a camera following his every move. He wandered eight corridors before he saw another person, and they looked so entirely uninteresting that he gave up and went for Map external.
Unfortunately, that took him to a map of the universe. The one they were in, at any rate, which was Home, but the inscriptions on the outer edges listed nearby universes as if they were places they might possibly go. As if they were places they could have been right now. He hurriedly switched to Video External and spun in a wide circle before spotting, some distance away, the tiny dot that was the space craft Heero and Duo were on. He zoomed in until he could see through the windows of the hull and the lump in his throat made his chest ache.
So close, but so far. They were arguing, faces flushed but somehow stoic. They were all in so much trouble, and they didn’t have know the half of it. For that matter, neither did Trowa and he was the one sitting in His new shiny Room inside Frank, spying on them.
He exited the viewing options with a heavy sigh, looking at the other options with a small frown, not knowing what half of them even were, amused that there was an option for food delivery, and instead chose ‘communication’.
There was a query box asking for the number and he slumped in his seat. Was he supposed to punch in the number of the room he wanted to call? He had no idea but when he pulled up the number pad he smirked and typed in 37265. Two option buttons appeared; call and leave a message. He went for leave a message and the screen came up blank. He stared at it for a very long time.
“Well that’s weird.”
The words appeared on the screen and he bit his lip in annoyance. Of course, it would be voice activated. What on Frank wasn’t state of the art, after all, and made for your convenience. The lock on the door, obviously. If there was a lock on the door.
“You get used to the re-molecularization.”
He damn near fell off his chair. He stared at the words printed under his own on the screen and took several deep breaths, reminding himself he was a goddamned Gundam pilot and he didn’t freak out over talking computers. Often. Or something.
“Frank?”
“Yes?”
He was talking to Frank. Or something pretending to be Frank. Or maybe there was just some random person on board of floating black box Frank, who happened to actually be named Frank? Why didn’t this thing have a phone book, and an instruction manual for that matter?
“Why did you kidnap me?”
“I didn’t. I sent you an invitation. You came.”
He did what now? Trowa vaguely remembered the timings that no one else had spotted. Had Frank known they would be stuck, and call him? He was listed under ‘problem solving’ on the Preventers database. He’d assumed it was some strange joke of Yuy’s but maybe not. Had Frank seen it and gone and blown up a satellite, killed three of Quatre’s men and lured them in by waiting in that same spot just to invite him on board?
That seemed a little farfetched. It definitely made him frown.
“I don’t remember getting anything in the mail.”
There was a long pause. It was impossible to say if Frank was considering an adequate response, or had run off to use the loo. Trowa was in no position to do anything but wait either way.
“I apologise. The mailman wouldn’t collect my consignment.”
And it had a sense of humour. Wasn’t that just charming. It made Trowa want to punch it in the face and strangle it until it gave him all the answers he wanted, but he wasn’t even sure if he was talking to black box Frank or Frank the man down a few levels who ran off to use the loo and was just screwing with him because he was bored.
He took a few more calming breaths and made a mental note to take up meditation for real. Wufei had always said it was good for you, but Trowa had never seen the point. How could he possibly get any more calm? Duo had suggested meditation might be bad for his health; that if he relaxed any more his heart might stop. Trowa hadn’t been disinclined to believe him, at the time.
“Why am I here, Frank?”
“I don’t know.”
Well that was great. Trowa sighed and fiddled with the ends of his hair where they hung near his jaw, wondering what to do next.
“Am I a prisoner here?”
“No?”
Frank actually sounded confused. It was emotion enough that Trowa sat up and stared at the word on the screen and analysed the little question mark as if it might tell him something. It didn’t, of course, but it at least made him feel as if he was doing something.
“You just push at the door and it will open.”
What? Trowa turned in his chair and made a pushing motion at the door and sure enough it opened. He slumped over the back of the chair and groaned softly because none of this made any sense whatsoever, but he sure as hell wasn’t going to sit there talking to Frank, which he could do anytime, supposedly, when he could go and explore.
“Have fun, Trowa Barton.”
It grated, but Trowa ignored the computer and left His Room. It exited into a long white corridor and headed right, recalling the map he had seen and manoeuvring his way through the warren of corridors filled with doors just like his, each perfectly silent until finally he started passing people.
He sighed again. It was going to be impossible to fit in here. At first it was the clothing; he was in a Preventers jacket, a simple grey turtleneck and jeans. Everyone else was in the same, too-bright white dress looking thing. None of their shoes squeaked on the squeaky floor, but Trowa’s Prevention issue steel capped monstrosities did. He was beginning to realise why Heero had liked those horrendous yellow sneakers back in the day.
They were all Asian. That was a problem right there, and explained what they were wearing at the same time. The problem was that he wasn’t Asian, and not only was his hair too light, his skin too pale, his eyes too green and his clothing all wrong, but he was a good head taller than the tallest person he passed, and much taller than a lot of others. He could hear Frank chuckling in the back of his mind and wasn’t entirely certain it was his imagination.
The corridors eventually opened up into what looked like a station and he went over to stare at the board and scratch his cheek when his hair tickled and annoyed him, having absolutely no clue what to do. So when the shuttle pulled up he got on and took a seat.
A small boy was sitting across from him, staring at him with wide chocolate brown eyes. His hair was cut in a neat bowl around his head and his dress seemed a little big for him. He’d grow into it in no time, or so Trowa was sure his mother had assured him. Hopefully the kid would also grow into its eyes, which were like little saucers in its face about ready to fall out as he stared at Trowa.
Trowa didn’t respond at all, just stared at him and the kid eventually shifted uncomfortably and tucked itself in against its mother’s side. Strangely, scaring an infant felt good and left Trowa feeling a little less lost when the shuttle pulled up and he got out.
Only to be completely lost again. He had no real idea where he was. A shrine maybe? There was incense and bells and people coming and going down huge steps and he hurried after them, climbing the stairs and looking back, seeing the shuttle, but also beyond it, to parklands and pools and fountains, all of it sheltered by a white ceiling. It was strange and left Trowa feeling small and insignificant. He sighed and went into the shrine.
It was quiet inside, no one speaking. There was a line of people at the front waiting to light candles, and still more waiting to collect a fortune stick. There were others simply kneeling and praying, their faces upturned or downcast, lips moving without sound in an image that finally seemed natural to Trowa. These were people after all. Human, regardless of where they lived.
He leant against a wall in the back corner and simply watched them come and go, letting the calm wash over and reorient him, needing the mask to fall back into place. After a time, someone came to stand beside him, not in prayer like so many others, but just as still and observant.
“We don’t usually see people from the other sectors here.”
That caught Trowa’s attention and he looked down at the monk curiously. He wasn’t in white; was wearing traditional orange and it finally made Trowa smile.
“I’m...new, I guess. Still pretty confused about how everything works. But my room is in Sector 96.”
The man looked surprised, and then shrugged the curiosity away.
“Well, I would have assumed you were from the lower sectors. The twenties perhaps, but if this is where you want to be, who am I to argue?” The monk smiled, bowed slightly and drifted off to talk to others, or pray, or whatever monks did. Trowa watched him go and then hurried back to the shuttle.
Lower sectors. So he was high in the ship. He studied the shuttle map and got on what he hoped was the right one, taking a seat and trying to memorise the map he had seen and the numbers on it. He wondered if they gave out print outs of the shuttle system...that would be handy. He doubted it, simply because it would have made his life easier.
The shuttle went down and he found the small feeling of triumph in his gut ridiculous. He used to decimate military bases, and now he got excited about catching the bus. He didn’t get off at the first few stops, or any of the others that followed. He did change at an interchange after staring at one of the maps for a very long time and deciding he had to switch there, even though he really had no idea what he was doing. The map made no sense to him whatsoever, mostly because he had no idea what Sector or Level he wanted to be on, and neither seemed to be laid out in a way that was to be understood.
Eventually he found himself on Level 2, sector 29. He had no idea what that meant, except that the people here were dressed in white suits instead of dresses, were of his height or taller and all looked of European decent. He wondered why he hadn’t been housed in this sector, instead of being somewhere he stood out so much, but then maybe the idea was to make sure he didn’t blend in? Which didn’t make a whole lot of sense when he could move around freely and go somewhere he could blend in whenever he wanted.
Which made him wonder if he was carrying a tracking device. He sighed, having not thought about it, because he was almost sure no time had lapsed, but he wasn’t convinced he hadn’t been unconscious at some point they first transferred him into Frank. And who was to say the transfer itself hadn’t altered him in some way? He had no way of knowing and wished the others had at least received an invitation to come on board as well. Yuy would have been able to figure out the damn computer at least, though he might have destroyed it in the process.
The annoying thing was that it was becoming increasingly clear that his only real source of concrete information was the people around him, or Frank. If he asked the people around him there was a chance they would realise he was a stranger and possibly not supposed to be there, which he didn’t want, but if he talked to Frank then...Frank would know what he was talking about.
He scoped the place out. He asked mundane questions, struck up useless conversations, had entire meaningless arguments, just building up what he knew of the place and its people. They were hard to anger, too understanding. They lived by routine; get up, have breakfast, go to work, go home, spend time with the family, have dinner, play on the computer, go to bed. Their lives were simple. They knew their neighbours, in fact they seemed to know almost anyone in their sector, calling out to one another and rushing to greet and then part and greet someone else. Trowa made sure he got to know a lot of people, who greeted him anew later in the day so he could remind them who he was. Someone nice, unfamiliar to the sector, and someone they could trust.
He told them all his name was Triton, the name Nataku had given him when he came on board, and no one so much as blinked or asked where he was from. He wouldn’t have known the answer anyway. Sector 96? Earth? The second star from the right? Where they hell was Frank now, anyway? Were they still parked near Duo and Heero in their small Preventer’s shuttle? Unlikely.
By the end of the day he at least thought he might have some idea of how things worked. Sort of. Socially at any rate, but he took his time catching the shuttles back, partly because he was still observing people and partly because he got lost four times.
He even found a food store, and had to pretend he had left his wallet at work and make sure the old lady who ran the store felt sorry enough for him to give him bread and milk. It was enough to learn you didn’t have money here, just a card that charged everything to your precious room, which had an account that maintained your salary and finances. He’d have to check the computer.
He was tired when he got to His Room, and went straight to the bathroom, going in to shower and making sure he was as squeaky clean as the rest of the world he’d been thrust into. When he checked the closet it was fully stocked with white towels and crisp clean white suits, all in his size. He took out a pair of brand new pyjama pants and put them on, a little amused. He couldn’t say whether they had been there before but he doubted it. He wondered if he should try and build some sort of surveillance system to install in His Room but didn’t really know where he would find an electronics store to buy the parts...people here didn’t really seem to need anything like that. Didn’t seem to need anything at all.
He ran the towel over his hair and went to rummage through the desk, finding it had been stocked with a smaller, portable computer. He went to sit in the middle of the room again and turned it on, noticing that it could link to his main computer, or work offline, and he set it to work offline by default and only connect when requested from an external source with his password. Not that he thought that would hold out the system if it was watching him, but it was worth a try.
He wrote down everything he could remember about the day, the names of all the people he had met, observations about each station he had passed, each interchange and where they led, each shuttle and the types of people who travelled on them. He made sure he recorded even the smallest of details; the scent of each woman’s perfume, how many children they had, how they parted their hair...silly, mundane things that were the difference between him being an old friend and a mystery man to be avoided. He didn’t have the luxury of being the latter.
When he was done he turned on the computer, only to find a flashing red light on the screen, labelled ‘Notices’. He clicked on it and almost laughed, shaking his head and reading through the details, recording those on his laptop as well.
‘Dear Mr Bloom, we are pleased to inform you your request to transfer into the military guard division has been approved. Please report to duty at 0600 in the morning at Level 1, Sector 1.
1’s somehow seemed exciting. He had no idea how to get there, but a map had been attached and he downloaded it to the laptop. If he got desperate he could ask the monk.
So his first concern was taken care of; he had a job. Everyone here had a job, even children. Their job was to go to school, get 100% on everything they did, and become productive members of society, and even they seemed perfectly happy with this arrangement. Trowa found it creepy; what sort of kid liked school, seriously?
He searched through the icons and found ‘Money’. He opened his account and blinked. It was set up like any online banking system, but as suspected his account number matched his room number, and his name was Triton Bloom. The bank insignia was the same one he had seen what felt like a lifetime ago, on Frank’s nose; the altered Illuminati pyramid with its closed eye and sword. That didn’t mean he thought they were a bank. It wasn’t even what really caught his attention.
He sat back in his chair and pondered the front page for a very long time, before deciding that even in Frank-land, a hundred million dollars had to be a lot of money. Enough to do anything. He was rich, and he hadn’t worked a day yet. When he went in and looked at the account details, he found the account had been opened years ago, and that a pay slip had been deposited every fortnight, gaining interest by the truckload as it all remained untouched.
So. He had money. Second concern was definitely taken care of. He wondered rather idly if he could get a monkey charged to his room, but didn’t really want to find out. Monkeys would have to draw unwanted attention and he didn’t want anyone looking into his affairs. Especially not when he couldn’t actually account for whatever his previous job had been. He’d thought it was with Preventers, but apparently not. Preventers didn’t pay this well.
The other icons were more mundane; Music, Films, Recreation, Bookings, Facilities and he even found a Help Desk and gratefully devoured the manuals he found there while he ate bread and drank milk. He was definitely getting food delivered tomorrow, and put in the order early so it would be there when he got home.
Frank, he learned, was a remarkable feat of engineering, not that he hadn’t known that before, but however the hell he worked, he did it damn well. Everything worked smoothly, and everyone was so gratingly happy Trowa almost didn’t know what to do with himself.
But he had two of three things achieved. Money to get things done, a job to build his cover, and lastly he just needed to figure out what the hell he was supposed to be doing here. Which unfortunately meant talking to Frank again.
It wasn’t that Trowa disliked Frank, because he didn’t. How could you hate an inanimate object? Unless he was talking to some guy in another sector but he didn’t think so. People here just didn’t do prank calls. It was another reason he thought they were a bit off in the head. It wasn’t even that he distrusted Frank, even though he sure as hell did. The machine had abducted him and thrust him into God didn’t even know what.
It was that Frank had a sense of humour. That was just weird. Giant disappearing colonies didn’t crack funnies.
He put in the message request and stared at the blank screen for a long time, trying to decide what to say.
“Thank you, Frank.”
The response was slow to come, as if Frank was having trouble pulling himself away from something else to talk to him. Trowa almost felt guilty, and wondered if that was the general idea.
“For what, Mister Barton?”
“Don’t you mean Mister Bloom?”
Again the long pause, as if the machine were struggling to compute his response and form an adequate response. Trowa almost wished he chose chat. Did this thing have a face as well? That would be priceless, he would have to try it later. Maybe he looked like Treize Kushrenada. Hell, maybe it was Treize. Nothing, at this point, would surprise him.
“I suppose I do.”
He supposed? How did a machine suppose?
“For my new career choice being approved. I trust my new employer has my account details to continue depositing my salary?”
“Of course, that’s done automatically when someone changes occupation.”
Of course. Trowa rolled his eyes and was just grateful that for whatever reason Frank had made him a rich man instead of a poor one. Even if it did make him wonder what Frank thought he needed that much money for.
“I searched the computer options and the help desk. The only information I could find on Military Issues was a pamphlet for school kids considering it as a career. Do we have a large military?”
“Large enough. Military is Level 1.”
“Sector 1, yes I know.”
“Level 1 only has one Sector,” Frank’s disembodied voice informed him and Trowa felt that growing sense of unease. In his whole day’s travel he never reached a ‘wall’; a place that must have been the external shell of Frank. There was always something else beyond where he was, and something else again beyond that. If the military took up an entire level of Frank, it was large. Possibly the largest force in the history of Man. It was an unpleasant thought.
“Do you know why I chose to enlist?”
“I am certain I have no idea.”
Certain. Trowa was glad someone was certain of something. He rolled his eyes and stroked the edge of his laptop, staring at the screen as if staring into a man’s face and trying to see the secrets written there, but all that was written was their conversation in black and white.
“Why is everything white?”
“Research showed white had a calming effect on people and developed trust. Humans associate it with good health and wellness.”
Fair enough, but it was in such abundance Trowa felt like a germ most of the time. Maybe it felt different once you were actually dressed in white all the time. One could hope.
He sighed, heavily, and he could almost feel Frank slipping away, focussing more on those other tasks that had seemed to have his attention from the beginning. That was fine, he only had one more question anyway.
“Frank.” Was he still there? How did you know if someone walked away from the message board? He supposed he was lucky to get immediate responses at all. What if Frank stopped checking his messages?
“Yes, Triton.”
“Why am I here?”
The pause. Again.
“I want you to save someone.”
“Who?”
No reply.