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THE NEWCOMER
Path A1A4B by Jay
[Path A1A4B. Interrogate Belial in empty quarters.]
Painfully opening his bruised eyes, Belial returns to icy-cold consciousness in the dimness of a metal-plated room -- 'A cell?' he wonders vaguely. 'Another jail cell?'
As he moves to get up, he feels -- 'What the hell?' -- an unfamiliar resistance upon his arms and legs, and finally realizes that he is bound to a chair, his wrists tied behind the backrest, his legs tied to the chair legs.
"Don't try," says the calm but firm slightly-accented voice.
"What?" Belial searches in the dark, then realizes, "Ah yes, I recognize that voice. Captain Kan-chiang of the hovercraft Nosferatu. How are you? I'd shake your hand, but as you can see--"
"Shut up, Belial!" spits the female voice. "Who are you? And what the f*ck are you doing on our ship?"
"Belial?" the oily long-haired stranger laughs, with his odd belly-laugh. "Don't you know who I am, Sky?"
"W-What? How do you--" Sky hesitates, a tinge of vague familiarity floating on the edge of her memory.
"Or," Belial continues, "should I say 'Patty Lee'?"
With the mention of that name -- one of Sky's polished aliases in the Matrix -- her memory of Belial bursts forth brightly with undeniable clarity.
"Bobby Lyle?" she remembers. "B. Lyle?"
Sky awkwardly activates a hand-held light and swings the hazy beam onto Belial's briefly blinded grimace. Except for the straggling long hair, rough beard, facial contusions, and general bodily greasiness, the murderer sitting before her holds the same eyes -- the same blood-shot blue eyes that struggled, almost a year ago, with the manufactured reality within the Matrix, and the unplugged unmasked reality of the truth. "It can't--" she gasps.
"But it is," Belial softly answers.
"How did you get onboard?" Captain Kan-chiang asks again, his incredible patience holding firm as Belial's belly-laugh somehow continues to get louder, larger, longer...
"Hahahaha! How do you THINK I did?" Belial chuckles. "Come on! I've had students plugged in the Matrix who were more intelligent... You KNOW the lax maintenance checks back at Zion... I snuck onboard! How else?... And don't get me started on Zion--"
"Why?" the captain calmly interrupts. "Why did you do this?"
"Why?" Belial smiles. "WHY? You're asking me 'Why?'" He begins another explosive burst of laughter. "Hmmm... Maybe because my beautiful wife-to-be was murdered?... Maybe because I woke up from a f*cking coma to find that my life was a f*cking lie? I was a good professor, and I was gonna be a great husband, and maybe a decent father!" He pauses to blink away the tears of washed-away hopes and dreams. "Or maybe because Zion is a f*cking slimy sh*thole of wishful-thinking losers? How about that?"
"That's enough," Kan-chiang turns to Sky, who switches off the light. The room returns to its former dimness, a dimness that feels even darker amidst the utter blackness of Belial's soul.
As Belial continues to rant -- "I'm not even a hacker, Sky!" -- the captain and his second officer wordlessly squeak open the metal door -- "So why'd you unplug me, bitch?" -- and exit the room in downcast silence. As the door clangs shut, Belial adds more loudly, "Sky?! Why'd you unplug me?! Did you feel sorry for me?! Sky!!"
Blankly stirring her tin can of nutritional goop, Sky gently asks, "How's Hitch doing?" as the captain enters the mess room.
"For a while he was busy in Engineering," Kan-chiang answers then sits down, "finding things to fix or scrub or calibrate... things to take his mind off what happened... I just sent him to the cockpit to monitor our progress to Zion."
"I still don't understand," Cyberreyn reluctantly takes another tiny spoonful of her goop, "How was Belial a professor in the Matrix when he was supposed to be in Zion? Zion isn't within broadcast range, right?"
The captain's brown eyes widen briefly. "You DO remember some bits of training, after all." Then just as quickly they narrow. "You're right, Zion is out of range. Which leads me to believe that Belial may have been a crew member on another hovercraft."
Cyberreyn knits her brows in thought. "But why would he WANT to join a crew?"
Staring into her slimy tin can, Sky answers, "To return to an ordinary life in the Matrix."
"But something changed," the captain adds. "Something must've happened to force him to kill."
"What?" Cyberreyn asks.
"We don't know," the captain says.
"But," Sky hesitates, "But I think his intention was to kill... me."
Choose Path A1A4B1 to follow Kan-chiang to the cockpit.
Choose Path A1A4B2 to follow Sky through the hovercraft.
Choose Path A1A4B3 to follow Cyberreyn to her quarters.
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