Demicore

Chapter 15

"Erik, can you follow my finger?" Sonya asked, holding one finger up in front of his eyes and moving it back and forth. His hand moved like he was flexing claws while he watched her finger move. "How are you feeling?"

He watched her carefully. She was his cub. His. He should be able to place her name. Words... she was asking him a question... wanted an answer... feeling... "Rough. Need to move."

"I'm afraid I can't let you up yet. We need to get you mentally stabilized before we can let you up, Dad. Something is wrong." Concern was in her voice.

He wanted to calm her, all of them, but didn't know how. Three of them were bustling about the room, one was hanging back. He smelled the air. She was afraid. Adrenaline was running high for all of them. He took a brief second to wonder how he knew these things before registering a sting and his world started to fade again.

Katlin and Sonya started hooking up the monitors as soon as he stopped straining. The computer was good by itself, but it could work even better with the wires reading his brain and heart waves directly. They set up every monitoring system known to them to try to figure out what was going on inside him. His brain waves were projected onto a large screen on the wall where Sonya and Katlin could analyze them together.

At first there was a jumble of patterns on the wall, barely discernable. As they became used to how many thoughts went on in his head at the same time, it became easier to follow. They watched him go through a dream cycle that looked particularly vicious, into deep sleep where his brain wasn't as active, and even spoke to him a couple times to see if he would recognize their voices in his sleep. To their dismay, his knowledge of what was going on around him seemed to be fading slowly... almost like Alzheimer's ... He had moments of lucidity where he knew what was happening and encouraged them to keep him sedated until they could figure this out. He expressed a distinct urge to leave, explore... search for something... but he didn't know what and that was always right before they had to shoot him with another tranq.

Three days into the analysis, they adjourned for a brief lunch directly after giving him a shot only to come back to the lab and find it empty. Test equipment, wires, and straps from the gurney were all scattered around the room.

"But the computer and all its monitors are intact," Katlin commented," except that its sensors are destroyed so it has no way of telling us what is going on in here other than there is a malfunction."

Steve and Sonya were already pulling up the surveillance up to the point of destruction. They watched in awe as Erik woke from his induced slumber, flexed muscle that hadn't been there before to break the bonds that held him, and started ripping up the room. Immediately, the computer had sent an alert that he was awake, something was wrong. That was when they had started heading back, so it could only have been a few minutes from that point... They watched him pause in his smashing of things when he got to the computer system. He looked at it as though it were a fond memory that he couldn't quite grasp, then made a single finger strike at each lens and - they could only assume - pull wires from the rest of its sensors before making a significant hole where there should have been a locked door and leaving.

Sonya pulled two separate keyboards, typed on each one separately, and pulled two more surveillance systems from outside the building. The alarms were surprisingly not blaring. Then they saw why. He had stopped to put in codes on his way out.

"How is it that he can't control his urge to run and barely knows who he is, let alone who we are, but he can remember all the alarm codes to everything on the premises?" Elizabeth inquired of the room.

"You are looking for a logical answer to a problem we cannot even come close to identifying yet," Sonya replied in frustration, "How can you expect us to answer you?"

Elizabeth's eyes welled with tears she refused to let fall. "This is a setback, but it's not a failure," Katlin told her gently, then turned to Sonya, "Watch yourself."

"If this is only a setback, tell me that whatever mode of transportation he took has some sort of tracking device on it so we can follow him. Without his senses about him, who knows what kind of deadly situations he will find himself in..." Elizabeth returned, still fighting tears of frustration and fear.

Her words sparked the others into motion. Katlin took charge of the situation and started handing out orders, "Steve, establish a link through the computer to every tracking system we have and see which one is going haywire in directions it doesn't belong, forward it to us on the supercraft. Sonya, I know you don't think it's ready, but get it out anyway, it's the only hope we have of catching him. Mom, three doors down the second hallway to the left on the right - grab some emergency knapsacks. Four. I will meet you out front and take you to the hangar."

Sonya started to argue but the other two were already gone. Yes, she was against using the supercraft. She wasn't done building it yet. It was fully assembled and equipped with every thing from long range scanners and transmitters to holographic imaging for conversations with any of their labs anywhere in the world to everything needed for complete water submersion and the most powerful, precise thrusters known to man. It was based on the Fiero Erik had "updated" right around the time Andy had been kidnapped... If it hadn't been for that car, they never would have found her in time or caught Joey, the guy responsible for that and Mom's knifing. But the testing wasn't finished. It hadn't actually done those things, only simulated them. Other than the submersion, but that was only in the pool so it didn't really count.

She activated all the systems on one of the two prototypes only to have the system tell her that it was headed toward the Atlantic Ocean. She triple checked the systems. They reported the same movement even after the systems were turned off and turned back on. She quickly activated the other craft and sent a message to Katlin alerting her of the situation.

"Erik has taken the second supercraft." Her breast pocket said in a not quite monotone.

"I meant to ask you," Elizabeth said as she caught up with Katlin, "what exactly is a supercraft and why would it not be ready yet?"

"It is something Sonya has been designing, building, and testing for about 50 years. If it's up to her, it will never see real field time because it will never be perfect. Every time it's done, she has found a new, better way to do something else or has made a new discovery that will outdate another already implemented, ect. ect. whatever. She's a perfectionist.

She designed it based on a car Dad had once. He had done some major modifications to it to make it work like a submarine up to 150 feet below the surface and do short term 'flights'. I have been itching to take this thing for a spin for the last 45." She grinned, "And if Dad has the other one, it should make it easier for us to find him. I'm sure she's already turned on the tracking systems."

Elizabeth smiled. So this really was going to be a short detour from figuring out what was really going on with Erik. If he had a craft with tracking enabled, then they would be able to follow him wherever it was that he felt such an urge to go and just maybe that would cure the problem... She watched Katlin load the tranquilizer guns into a small storage area as Sonya arrived and did a once over inspection of the craft. She frowned.

"He would take the one that goes three clicks faster." She climbed in to the craft and started the engine with a series of buttons, "He always has had better instincts when he isn't allowing his natural thought process to get in the way."

"Yes, he always was like that," Elizabeth said with a slight smile playing at the corners of her lips as she threw the packs into the craft.

"That means," Sonya told her irritatedly, "that even if we had left at the same time he would arrive to the destination first because his craft can move faster than ours assuming the same weight. Add to that the fact that we are carrying more than he is and he has a head start and we can only hope he doesn't leave the craft because that is where our tracking ability ends."