Escape, Part 5
"What are 'Emojis?'" Cait asked with a weird look. "That sounds like a horrible name."
"They're these old symbols that teenagers in the Milky Way Galaxy used to use in place of actual words. Styx used to use them in communication with each other due to how outdated they were. Anyone that somehow managed to hack our messages wouldn't know what the hell we were saying," Fate explained.
"But why are the Advanced using them? And why for this?"
"They're batshit crazy, Cait," Fate matter-of-factly.
"Fair point. Never mind."
"I hate to interrupt, but maybe you and I should start looking?" Romero asked, glancing nervously at the door. The guards had started taking turns hammering at it with their Divine Reach, continuing their efforts despite the door remaining undamaged throughout.
"Good idea," Fate responded.
"What exactly are we looking for, though?"
"Troop movements, supply caches, anything to do with their military. Also, you know, anything that might be helpful to ignorant people like me and Cait. How Divine Energy works, maybe a dictionary or something about the multiverse," Fate said as he started checking all of the chips.
"That sounds like a lot of different chips. How are we going to carry all of this?"
Fate paused and put a hand to his chin. After a few scratches, he grabbed his jumpsuit by the waist and started tearing it apart. Soon he had separated the chest from the leggings. He tied the stump of one sleeve into as tight of a knot as he could, then tied the other, whole sleeve into its own knot and did the same with the neck hole.
"There," he said, holding his makeshift bag. "Put them in that. And with the space in this thing, we can just grab anything that seems slightly interesting."
"Uhh, sir?" Romero said, pointing down. Fate frowned and looked down, only to find his pants hanging down around his ankles since the top part of his jumpsuit wasn't there to hold it up.
The pure white, Advanced-issued underwear he wore was on display for all to see. His frown deepened as he tore the intact sleeve of his new bag off and retied the stump. He then pulled his pants up and tied the sleeve around his waist. Thankfully, the sleeve had some stretchiness to it, allowing him to wrap it all the way around with only mild discomfort.
"Better?" Fate asked. Romero nodded, and they both started studying the chips.
Cait watched all of this happen, trying to hide a smirk. Fate didn't miss that, and decided to tease her for it.
"Like what you see?" he asked, his face blank as he studied an emoji of a magnet and tried to decide whether it was worth grabbing.
"I've seen better in the locker rooms," Cait smirked, taking a seat at a monitor as she resumed her hacking attempts.
"I always thought lean and mean was better than hulking and brutish, but I guess that's just me. I'll make a mental note that you like bodybuilders with bigger muscles than brains."
"I never said anything about my preferences," Cait replied, brow furrowing as her latest password guess failed, causing the screen to flash as red as it buzzed.
"Try something pretentious and smart-sounding, like 'Judgment,'" Fate suggested, pulling the magnet emoji chip in the bag. A buzzer sounded as the guess failed. "Multivariate?" Another buzz. "Revocation." Buzz. "Paradigm." Bing.
"That was it," Cait said.
"Great. I'm just going to keep tossing halfway-interesting chips in the bag; see if you can find which one of these, if any, has schematics so we can make the monitor at home and read them there. Or see if the computer itself has it."
"Wait, quit pulling those out," Cait said suddenly. Fate obliged, his hand stopping around a chip as he looked at her with a raised eyebrow. "I can read all of them from this, as long as they're plugged in," she told him. "And it looks like I can use an emergency protocol to download all of the data on one chip, so I'm going to need you two to put all of those back in."
"Are you serious?" Fate asked, eyeing the makeshift bag he had filled halfway with chips. Romero's eyes widened as he stopped on his way to Fate, arms overflowing with the data chips.
"Of course, I am. Cho-chop."
The two begrudgingly started placing all of the chips back in, the process being much shorter than taking them out. When the last one was in place, Fate called to Cait to begin the downloading process. She pressed a few keys and moved the mouse, initiating the computer's emergency protocols.
"Uh, bad news," she called out. "This is going to take at least five minutes."
"How much time do we have until that scientist Romero mentioned gets here?"
"Less than that."
"Fuck."
"Yeah."
Fate and Romero gathered around the door, the former crossing his arms as they met the gazes of the guards outside. They made sure to leave a gap of seven feet to give them room to dodge if the guards outside opened fire.
"Do we have a plan?" Romero whispered.
"Stay alive until that chip finishes downloading, then get the hell off of this ship."
"I meant, for staying alive."
"Simple," Fate said as a man in a lab coat shoved the guards out of the way and peered inside, looking decidedly not happy to have been bothered. "Don't die."
"That's a terrible plan. I don't even know if that can be called a plan."
"It's worked for me so far, hasn't it?" Fate asked rhetorically as the man on the other side swiped his keycard into the card reader. The door hissed as it unsealed, retracting slowly into the ground. So slowly, in fact, that the download's progress bar had time to go from 70% to 85% by the time it was down.
The scientist stepped in, returning Fate's stare with a look of utter annoyance. His aura made him out to be an Avatar on the brink of Leveling up; a minor threat, but a threat nonetheless. When he spoke, it was monotonous, as if he was giving an unexciting lecture.
"I have half a mind to punish the two of you for escaping, but it was that oaf Norman's mistake for not using Quox metal from the get-go. You, however, Romero, are a disappointment. I told my superiors time and time again that giving the members of the soldier caste individual names would spark undesirable free will, and now I've been vindicated."