Escape, Part 4

Cait cursed under her breath when she heard the sound of the data room guards coming their way. "There goes the element of surprise," she whispered.

"Alright, I have an idea," Fate said, telling the two his plan in a hurried hush.

"That's insane," Romero protested. "A few of them are Avatars, according to your words. There's no Level difference to protect you, or me, for that matter."

"Actually, this is pretty tame for him," Cait replied. "And his Manifest Power will work on anyone within his Level, from what I've seen."

"Besides," Fate said, "You have to do whatever we do, remember? Unless you'd rather we leave you here and do this ourselves?"

"No, of course not," Romero said quickly. "But this is still a bad idea."

"You can say that only if this doesn't work," Fate said dryly, placing a hand on the shoulders of Cait and Romero. "Now, get ready to run."

The sound of boots against the ground grew closer as the guards on the other end of the corner crossed the hundred or so feet between the door and the position of Fate and his friends. The trio edged close to the corner, and when the foot of a guard appeared around the corner, Fate squeezed the shoulders of the other two.

They broke into a mad dash, running right through the startled guards and popping out behind them, where they continued sprinting until they made it to the door.

The trio gathered their divine powers and unleashed the entirety of their Divine Reach on the door, amplified by Cait's Manifest Power. The first impact warped the steel, the second bent it almost in half, and the third sent the door flying off the hinges as the three rushed into the room. Cait smashed a button on the inside and a secondary door, thinner and red, slid up from the floor, blocking off the guards outside with a hiss.

They punched and pounded on the door, yelling and shouting, even though they knew personally that this emergency door was several times stronger than the one the trio had brought down.

"And they don't have remotes?" Fate asked Romero.

"No, the Advanced don't trust them that much. They'll have to call a Level 3 Scientist over to unlock the door. We have about thirty minutes, I'd say."

"Then let's stop dawdling and get to work," Cait told them.

"'Dawdling?' Okay, grandma," Fate snickered.

"Shut it, gramps. You're older than I am now, Mister Past Fifty."

"Ouch, okay. Mean."

With the jokes done, they swept their gazes around the room. It appeared to be a typical server room, the standard white walls of the Advanced holding ten rows of tall, sleek white blocks that glowed with blue lines pulsing throughout them in zigzagging lines.

The blocks flowed seamlessly into the back wall, necessitating anyone browsing to go down one row, only to turn around and come back to go down the next. Each row had around five feet of space between them and the next, or them and the wall. The blocks were just as wide.

Every five inches on the blocks, both vertically and horizontally, were rectangular chips that stuck halfway out of the blocks and glowed faintly with light blue light. On either side of the door they had just entered from were bulky white cubes, upon which rested monitors with a small tower plugged in which held a spot to insert the chips.

Around these were a few data chips, lacking the vibrant blue glow due to not being plugged in. The whole room was one hundred and fifty feet wide and about fifty feet long, and everything had a red tint from the flashing alarm lights in each corner.

Cait and Romero went to work on the monitors, using the system's database in an attempt to find something useful. Fate antagonized the guards through the reinforced glass of the door, sticking his thumbs in his ears and waggling his tongue and fingers at them. He turned away with a chortle from one of them flipping him the bird as he heard Cait curse.

"What's wrong?"

"It's password protected," she told him.

"Then hack it."

"I can't 'hack it.' I don't even know the first thing about hacking. That's Tom's thing, not mine."

"Then how do we get what's on these chips? And more importantly, how do we know which ones are worth grabbing? There's got to be at least thirty that are nothing but shower schedules and lunch menus."

"Why would they have thirty chips, each capable of storing one thousand petabytes, that's full of nothing but useless information like that?"

"Actually, we keep a record of everything," Romero chimed in. "A few of these have the exact dates and times of when some scientist took a shit four thousand years ago."

"…WHY?"

"You'd be surprised how often that kind of information becomes important. An Incarnation from the main branch was terminated recently based on evidence from one of those. They found out that he was lying about using the bathroom at a specific time as a Prodigy forty thousand years ago and was responsible for the death of one of his superiors."

"They learned all of that from that?" Fate asked bemusedly.

"We don't have time for this," Cait interjected. "We need to decide which of these chips to steal before that Level 3 Scientist gets here and lets those bloodthirsty Embodiments in."

"Well, they are labeled," Romero said. "Although the symbols are so archaic and outdated that no one really knows what they mean. I can probably deduce which ones are useful if they have the same markings as the ones in the Level 1 Library."

"Then do that!" Cait exclaimed. "Why did we even try the monitors if you could do that?"

Romero pushed himself out of his chair and heaved a sigh. "Because I hate those symbols. They look ridiculous as if someone made them as some kind of twisted joke."

Fate, curious as to what he meant, took a peek at one of the chips. On it was a weird, curling pile of something brown, with a face and eyes. Looking at the next one, he found a yellow circle with eyes and a surgical mask and what looked like two hands giving a thumbs up.

"…"