It was time. After all the work that
they had done, it was finally time to see if the Lost Unit
design that they had finalized was viable. Since Howard was the
one with the least time left, he had volunteered. Hayami was
just praying that things would go well. As he watched the
monitors for the processing-tank that held one of his last close
friends, Hayami thought back to Danielle’s condition.
She had just started to complain of
steadily worsening headaches, which all of them knew was the
first stage of the anti-rebellion virus taking hold. Danielle
was currently off making herself more noodles. Hayami had to
chuckle at that: here they were, arguably some of the most
brilliant geneticists in the world, and they were living on
coffee, soda and instant ramen. Like a bunch of stereotypical
geeks.
The sheer peculiarity of the situation
was enough to make it funny.
When Danielle came back in, holding a
cup of steaming ramen noodles with a fork sticking out of it,
Hayami couldn’t help but start chuckling again.
"What’s so funny?" Danielle asked,
raising an eyebrow.
"Nothing," Hayami said, shaking his head
and turning back to the monitor.
"If you say so," Danielle said,
shrugging. "How’s Howard doing?"
"He seems to be responding well to the
retro-viruses," Hayami said, sobering. "But it really is too
soon to tell right now."
"Yeah. I hope it goes well, for our sake
as well as his," Danielle said.
Looking at the inert figure suspended in
the processing-tank, Hayami added his own silent plea. For all
their sakes, he hoped that this would be the time they overcame
the odds. Turning back to the monitor, Hayami continued his
silent vigil, accompanied only by the soft sound of Danielle
eating. He knew why she didn’t take her meal in the mansion’s
kitchen, as nice as it was: none of them wanted to be alone
anymore.
Even if they couldn’t really do anything
for Howard while he was being processed, even if they could only
sit and watch the retro-viruses work – or not – the two of them
were at least going to be there to lend Howard moral support.
Even if he was completely unaware of them being there to do so.
Hayami remembered that he had once been
an intensely private person. But that had been before Chronos,
before he had been inducted into their ranks of processing
techs. Professor Sumio Odagiri had been his mentor, and as time
had gone on Hayami had found himself amassing a circle of close
friends and casual acquaintances. It hadn’t taken much for
Hayami to throw in his lot with Sumio and the others who wanted
to fight against Chronos.
Hayami had long since come to the
conclusion that, whatever their ultimate goals were, Chronos was
evil and needed to be stopped. As his employment with them
forced him to do more and more things that he personally found
reprehensible, like the processing of unwary people into Sleeper
Units, Hayami found himself more and more in accord with Prof.
Odagiri and the people who had originally worked with the
professor.
Working in Mt. Minakami, and then being
transferred into Relics Point, had been both a godsend and a
curse. On the one hand, he had been working much more closely
with Prof. Odagiri and some of his closer friends, and on the
other it had also meant that he’d had to work with the Sleeper
Units in Takeshiro. That, however, had only made him more
determined to bring Chronos down.
And now here he was, out of Chronos and
trying to engineer himself and his remaining friends into Lost
Number Zoanoids so that they would be able to escape from both
the rule of the Zoalords and Chronos’ anti-rebellion virus. It
was so strange how life could take such drastic right turns
without even the slightest warning. Hayami sighed, turning back
to the computer monitor still recording the progress of Howard’s
processing.