Dramatic Death Scenes!

Mr.Face:

"I don't even..."More of this unnatural pausing in speech. It was like I couldn't breathe or something. Like something was caught in my windpipe. So strange. "I don't even know what to do... Where do I even START with the rebuild?" Another pause...Really. What was this? I didn't understand. It was like, somewhat alarming. I was somewhat alarmed at my own bodilly function, which seemed to be altering my breatheing pattern as it saw fit. Fine. Fine. There goes my health too. Immortality, Computer, Health... "I mean, My Prisoner, I cannot type. I cannot do all that. I don't even have that CD any more. The one with the speech to text programme. I'd be rewriting my own. From memory." I continued, simply rolling straight through the odd respiratory patterns.

I sent something else out of the toolbox flying across the cell, simply out of the need to throw something.

Cricket

I winced as something clanked against a wall and clattered to the ground. Well, as long as he was attacking the wall, and not me. Or at least, that's what I told myself. In a way, it was more frightening to see him in this state than the norm, simply because it wasn't normal and it wasn't right. Or . . . was it? A miracle might happen. He could give up, or it could also go terribly, terribly awry. "I don't s'pose-- there's anything I can do."

Mr.Face:

...He was offering to help me. I think.

That was...unexpected.

Well, he had eyes...And...eyes were typically necessary for proper keyboarding...And...If I could get my speech to text programme done...

Then I would only have 50 more years of recoding to do before I could even START with the sacrifices again.

But...Still. That would be...something. Right?

I felt my breathing regulate itself slightly. Ok...Well, I didn't know why it had been so inconsistent earlier, but If the idea of letting My Prisoner mess around on my keyboard made it go back to it's typical non-erratic rate...Then...so be it.

"Actually, My Prisoner...and this...This hold no bearing on your incarceration, I mean...You are still dead...But, There is something you can do...If...If you wouldn't be terribly offput by prolonging your life for another couple hours..." I proposed cautiously. I realised that as a misanthropic sadist I really had no place for asking a prisoner for help, and under typical working conditions, I would have simply shot him and done it myself, but...This was... Important. This...This was beyond sociopathy, I think. I may have despised him on principle...but...he had eyes. And...that was kind of...necessary.

Cricket

. . . He was asking for my help. Well, that had been unexpected. I'd honestly said that in what was meant to be a straight way, for lack of something better to say. 'Sorry mate, can't help you.' Perhaps my tone sometimes mislead. Breaking news, everyone: Cricket White is not always chipper and helpful. In fact, I felt I should help myself first, every now and again . . . such as right that moment. I was the one that was bleeding.

Of course, Mr. Face had his troubles, too, and they were a heavy burden in his own sociopathic way. Fifty years. Oi my my. That was almost four times my life so far, and perhaps it was as it would be if four times my lifetime collection of stolen wealth was suddenly gone . . . oh wait. Uncle took my profit anyhow. Ah well. Figuratively speaking, if I had money and lost it all, perhaps I would feel a fraction of what Mr. Face was going through. Once again . . . sympathy. It would come back to bite me, I knew it.

Of course I couldn't help Mr. Face! It would be sick tyrany! I couldn't do it, whatever it was . . . said the kid who'd been standing idly as innocent people were being slaughtered down the hall. What a hero. A real nobleman. Aye. What type of person was I, if I could have done something, but didn't? Not doing something at that moment had already served Mr. Face's purpose, so honestly, there was only one conclusion to that: I was already damned several times over for indirectly aiding the murder of innocent people, so what would one more sin-for-good do?

And most importantly of all, why did I want to help him? Aye, a couple more hours of life would be--

Life. Aye. Well, I was an idiot. What type of question was that? If I wanted to somehow help the poor souls under the rule of Mr. Face, I would first have to be alive.

And around came that guilt again. Helping Mr. Face, and in return not dying, if I did manage to pull that bargain off. That was monstrous. But I was already a bad person! I would finish that role up, and then, if I felt like it, patch myself up later.

"One condition," I breathed, bracing myself. He might just shoot me after this one. "I live."

Mr.Face:

That...That was quite a condition.

I didn't entirely know what to do to that. I mean..guaranteeing that now...out of cellblock five...Was...unheard of. Impossible. But...Still. I...I needed the help.

No.

No this was nonsense. This was my...feelings getting in the way again...Or something.

If I lied, and said yes and then retracted the affirmation...No. Lying was wrong.

I took a few more moments to think this over...Bouncing back and forth between my two options. I felt as though the tables had been turned somehow. I was normally the one providing options. This was strange.

"If you do it right. Fine. Anything short of right...and you are a dead man." I told him.

Cricket

Kid. Dead kid, I thought, glancing down at my five-foot-three-fourish self. But, whatever saying works. "Ah . . . what precisely should I be doing right?" I thought I was getting better at this whole not-choking thing. Aye, I still felt a bit half-drowned once in a while, but I'd gained a little control over the cough, and the breathing-- Oi my my. Who was I kidding. It was like breathing in gulps of water while getting stabbed in the chest a few times over, continually. I could cope.

Mr.Face:

"You have eyes. You will help me get my speech to text programme rewritten, and my OS up and running on a minimal functionality so that I can commence rebuilding the...MYRIAD of empty files on my own. I can do...frustratingly little without the speech to text." I stated.

I took a chance, and went ahead and unshackled him, allowing him to fall to the floor. "Well?" I asked the prisoner on the floor.

Cricket

I caught myself with a grunt, crouching there a moment as I panted for breath. Then, a sick feeling twisted in my gut as I realised what my hands were in. I pushed myself up off the gore--I mean, floor--, finding a clean spot on my pants to wipe the blood on. Not that it did much good. My arm was still gushing. Before then, I hadn't even realised that my wrists were bleeding a bit as well.

There's a certain unsettling disgust that looms in the back of one's mind when they're covered in the blood of other people. Huh. Wasn't it a bit twisted, that there were little trails of the stuff running across the concrete: a literal blood river?

I didn't want to think about it, so instead, I looked up at Mr. Face's teeth. It was just as an unnerving view, to be honest. Lovely. Now every time I saw his teeth I would think of blood rivers. "Ah. I . . . accept," I said after a moment. "Just one problem. I can't read."

Mr.Face:

...Well. That was going to be potentially problematic.

"Can...can you look at symbols and punch in the corresponding ones on a keyboard?" I asked, prepared to lock him back up immediately and start ripping the spine out of the back of his throat for refraining from telling me that.

Cricket

I cradled the hole in my chest and nodded, half-swallowing a cough. "A-aye." Just . . . get me out of there.

No, no. I wasn't doing this for me . . . aye? I was doing this to get Mr. Face back to . . . to what? Normal? Normal was still killing people. I was helping him. But, if I didn't help him, I would be dead, and then I wouldn't be able to do anything at all. But . . . even if I was alive, what could I do? What would I do? I wasn't a hero.

But either way was a dead end. I could be dead, or I could be a tyrant. Perhaps even a dead tyrant, if I ended up drowning from the wound anyhow.

Which one, which way?

". . . aye," I sputtered again.

Mr.Face:

That was all that was necessary. Oh thank...Internet...as unreliable as it was. As easily reset as it was. As...transient as it was. I was still thanking it. It had not wronged me, someone else had. Someone else...and...she would pay dearly for that in her subconscious later.

Right. Glad I had that sorted out, mentally.

"Come on My Prisoner. Keep up." I threw open the cell door and started up the stairs. He had legs. I hadn't even chopped into them. He could keep up with me, I was certain.

I was now looking forward to going up to my lab. For the first time in days, I was looking forward to it. Something would be achieved. Something. Speech to text programming would be achieved. The mere thought made me...so... not full of rage. It almost brought me down to rationality. I could fix it, I could fix it all if I wasn't floundering about on an obnoxious QWERTY that I couldn't even see.

Life could go back to normal.

Cricket

One short moment of hesitation, and I trailed after him. He seemed in higher spirits, which, I couldn't decide was a good thing or a bad thing. He was no longer mindlessly killing. Hoorah. He had his mind back. Oh bother. And I didn't want to know what might happen if I messed up.

Oh bother. If I messed up . . .

I would have to go about this very carefully, or God help Auda. Not to mention myself. One wince, and I tried to fling myself back into selflessness.

Mr.Face:

...I had left the door to my lab open. Stupid. Absolutely...Revoltingly, STUPID of me. I waited for My Prisoner to clear the door before throwing the cold iron door shut on us. I wondered if he could see, briefly, before deciding that it didn't matter yet anyway.

My footsteps echoed splendidly against the walls and ceiling, The whole lab was metal, and as such...Echoed. I loved the acoustics here.

As it opened up onto the laboratory floor, I could hear the wall of machinery that was my OS. She also had a screen, which served...some purpouse I suppoused, but I didn't really care to know. There was a rather large shrinebox along the curving wall, for...large things. Like...like people. And a videocamera for all of my audiovisual interpreters. If only all of those programmes hadn't been wiped. The sacrificial table in the centre of the room had it's USB plugged into a tower halfway along a wall, but also had been rendered useless by the crash.

"Alright. Sit by the keyboard." I told him. And then...I suppoused that I would have to write out all the scripting manually.

Where to get paper on such short notice? Hmm...

Cricket

So. Many. Buttons. I looked around for what I presumed to be the keyboard, and did as I was told, staring at the complicated little layout of rows of symbols and buttons and symbols on buttons . . . and buttons. A lot of them. I recognised them as letters, because on the bottom left I saw C and top left, W. There were also a few numbers that I recognised.

One . . . two . . . I formed my lips around the would-be whistle speak, but even if I hadn't been holding the sound back, it wouldn't have come easily. Oxygen. Why did people need so much of it?

Mr.Face:

He was sitting in my chair.

My chair.

At my computer.

I had to ignore that for a moment, as really, harping about him doing as I instructed would just be hypocritical on too many levels.

I took a piece of paper from a printer I never used, and siezed a pen and ruler, before I started manually writing out all of the coding.

It would take a while. I could hand it over a page at a time, and then he could...punch it all in. Right.

"Give me a moment while I write this all out for you..." I instructed him, as I started on the process. I really disliked writing. I couldn't tell if my letters overlapped, I couldn't tell if I'd already written that one, It was left too far up to chance for my liking. I mean, if he screwed up it may not even be his fault.

I did not like that.

After a few more moments I handed over the first sheet of coding.

Cricket

Very few times had I actually seen someone write, and so I watched with a bit of fascination as he marked across the paper. Next thing I knew, it was in my hand. A huge block of text that had absolutely no meaning for me, other than the obvious 'mess-up-and-die' bit.

Alright. I drummed my fingers lightly on the keyboard as I studied the symbols, and then managed to find the button that matched the first one. Alright. I moved on, slowly but surely picking up speed as I started to get a feel for what was where. Still . . . it would have helped to know I was creating on that screen. See, that's what I like about Luna, is that there's a note or a rhythm or an odd little sound for everything. It made sense. Here, there were only little squigly lines. "Out of curiousity--" Click. Another symbol pressed, another pause for breath, yet another pause to clear my throat. "--what's this text sound like?"

Mr.Face:

What did it sound like? Wait. Illiterate. Right. Illiterate people could only hear their language. Selective blindness in a way.

Probably asking what all that gibberish meant. "You are manually rebuilding my speech to text programme for me. Makes it so that I do not have to do all what you are doing every time I want to run a programme. I cannot type for obvious reasons." I stated as I churned out another page of coding. I wondered what my own handwriting looked like. "Does that sufficiently answer your oddly worded question?"

I could hear him typing away slowly at the computer. Very slowly. However, it was exponentially faster than my average WPH so...I could not complain.

Cricket

I stopped typing for a brief moment, pondering how to ask a question briefly. It was a bit tedious to talk. Terribly inconvenient, with all of the questions I had. "No words?" I asked, trying to find out exactly what the heck I was writing down. I resumed typing, a little bit faster.

Mr.Face:

"Well, It's coding. There are words...but...It's complicated." I tried to explain simply. I did not think he would be one to appreciate the intricacies of explaining hexadecimal. "It's more...mathematical I suppouse, than literary." I tacked on, hoping that that would suffice as an explanation.

I heard the speed increase. Good.

I finished up yet another page to hand over to him, and did so.

Cricket

Oi my my. Another page, and I hadn't gotten halfway through the first, yet. I picked my way along the keys carefully, still pondering, though not too hard, or I would forget which wierd-looking symbol I was on.

Mathmatics, aye? Numbers were interesting, all rhythmical, and like puzzles if you used them certain ways. Uncle had taught me all about that a long time ago, but years passed and I'd forgotten almost all of it, except the bits that had to do with money. "As in . . . numbers . . ." I breathed, pausing to look for a symbol I couldn't seem to figure out how to get onto the screen. "This one . . . doesn't look famili--" Damnit, screwdriver! I coughed to clear my throat and tried again. "F-familiar."

Mr.Face:

"You may want to employ the shift key if it isn't on the primary set of key settings." I explained briefly.

Several hours passed in a similar manner. I wrote, careful to keep everything in order, and to keep my letters from overlapping on eachother, and My Prisoner imput the data.

Finally I handed over the last sheet of coding. "Alright. There should be some kind of box on screen that says something. Click on the option farthest to your right. If all goes as planned...something will happen." I instructed him as he finished with the last of the coding.

Cricket
By that point, the only thing keeping me from crashing was the suspense of whether or not I messed up. A certain sting lingered in my eyes from starting at a screen for so long, not to mention . . . I was a bit dizzy from lack of air and blood. I'd ignored it. What was a little haze? I had to keep pressing the right buttons . . . had to stay awake . . .

Wait. He'd said something about a clicking the . . . ah. There. Click the box thing. That little electronic arrow lingered over the screen, and all I had to do was click. Oh bother. Please. Please do . . . whatever Mr. Face has in mind.

On the other hand, if it didn't do whatever he wanted, maybe I could just let myself pass out before anything too bad happened.

The arrow clicked. My fingers drummed lightly over the keyboard.

Mr.Face:

I heard it click. The mouse.

I paused for a moment as I heard some things powering up. This was a good sign. "OS? Can you hear me?" I asked cautiously, hoping that it had worked.

"Loading programmes. Please hold your commands." She responded. She spoke in the sound of blue. Or...the sound that I had at one point in time, prgrammed to be the 'sound' of blue.

"Certainly." I responded, listening to pleasant 'loading' elevator music. It may have been missing fifty years of information, but the speech to text programme... The ability to actually interact with the thing... That...That made my day. I smiled. I don't think it was an evil smile...just a... 'oh thank Internet that this thing is operating again' smile.

And then it occurred to me that I was about to let My Prisoner walk out of cellblock five. Walk. Without being in a body bag. That would not do.

Cricket

A lady's voice popped out of the air in a sudden burst of robotic perfection, and I immediately dropped my head face-first into the desk out of relief. Oh bother. It was hard to breath when you're bent over. It was so bothersome, every thought venturing back to whether or not I could breath at the moment.

Running a hand thorugh my hair, I eased up again. Oh, sweet darkness. I didn't have to open my eyes, if I didn't want to, and I would no longer have to force myself to stare at a screen so long that the bluish rectangle image got burned into my pupils. Ah. Lovely. Now . . . what to do. Simply allow Mr. Face to get working on his . . . thing? Fifty years was a long time. Still . . . he would be . . .

I was too dazed to get too deep into an internal monologue about morals, especially since the deed had already been done. No turning back.

There was one last moment of tension in my mind as I waited for Mr. Face to say something to me.

Mr.Face:

Well, As I'd stated earlier, I couldn't allow My Prisoner to walk out of here alive.

However, this posed a complicated moral dilemma. If I killed him now, I would have lied to him earlier. I dislike lying. Lying is bad. However, If I allowed him to walk out of here alive...well...I couldn't let him walk out alive.

I wondered briefly if this was what it was like having a conscience. "Well, My Prisoner...It seems that... You have upheld your end of the bargain." I started, still not sure how to finish him without feeling like I'd lied.

I had a thought. If he wasn't still in the building...hm...