Cross My Mind

CHANGE OF PLAN

(Back in the forest)

Mila wakes up and finds Garba seated next to her, his blue eye is still as deep as ever and the brown one looks slightly lighter. She immediately hugs Garba and whisper in his ear

“I am sorry Garba, I have judged you without knowing what you have suffered from, I have talked to you all when we first met back on the mega building without considering how it may be for you”. She broke down in tears and hugs Garba even tighter “MEDULLA said we may be in trouble, what is going on?”. She added.

Garba looked at her confused, with a puzzled expression on his face.

“What are you saying, I did not say anything about myself to you” he responded.

“no need to hide it Garba, MEDULLA showed you my painful memories, in similar logic, it is only fair it shows me yours” Mila replied.

“I don’t know about the team being in trouble though, we seem to be doing fine for now but you should know that we lost Fred in an earlier battle, apparently we were attacked at the time both of us were in the mental space and he died defending the two of us”. Garba said. He looked at his status window and realized that there are only four teams left in the game.

“Where is Lucy?” Mila asked

“She has gone out to get fresh water from the waterfall” he responded but before he could close his mouth, the two of them heard fast approaching footsteps. They each instinctively brought out their daggers and stood up, awaiting whoever is coming. Lucy came in panting, holding her knife put with blood still dripping from it.

“What is going on Lucy? There’s blood on your dagger and why are you so out of breath?” Garba sked

“I was out to fetch water because I was thirsty, I have already finished filling my bottle so I thought why not get a few avocados or peaches before Mila wakes up, it has been two whole days since she passed out so I thought she must be hungry when she wakes up. I left the waterfall and wandered around for a bit, walking around the forest; I came across Carson Marcus, the military maniac guy we fought in the first game. He had somehow gathered twelve players. Sneaked up and stalked them only for me to over hear him describing the cave for them, telling them that we are inside and we are the strongest team left so they need to join forces to and beat us to increase both their chances of winning, I rushed back as fast as I can but was attacked on the way by a separate player without a team, of course I sliced his neck as fast as I can and ran to warn you that they are on their way right now. We need to leave” she shouted.

Garba wasted no time, he picked his bag and helped Mila with hers as well, he opened his bag and brought out two large avocados and handed them to her, then looked at Lucy and smiled.

“One step ahead of you” he said.

The three, holding their weapons, Mila and Garba with a dagger in each hand and Lucy now holding her makeshift spear and two daggers she tied up her waist just in case she loses the spear.

Upon reaching the exit of the cave, the three were met with a group of thirty players surrounding the waterfall.

“I thought you said there were only ten of them, I am looking at thirty of them, that is three times more than what you told us” Mila shouted angrily.

“I was sure I saw ten, I don’t know how he got this many people here but isn’t escaping alive more important?”

Garba opened his map again and saw that even enemy players are shown because the game is about to end.

“The game is about to end, these are all the players left in the game, we need to fight this one out”

The group of twenty nine players together with Carson Marcus begin to close in he ring they have formed around what is left of Garba’s team, slowly and coordinated, holding their daggers until they are within an arm’s length to them.

All of a sudden, five military jeeps arrived out of nowhere at the waterfall almost adrift, parking around the group and followed by a large container van following behind them.

About forty sky blue dressed people each armed with assault rifles marched out of the van and took aim at the players, simultaneously A floating window with Dr. Akihiro appeared streaming live video on it and said

“Congratulations on winning the first game, please enter the van calmly and be taken back to the waiting hall for the final game, violators of this order will be shot” he said and ended the video, followed by the floating window disappearing.

All the thirty three players put down their knives back in their pockets, and immediately all the armed men dressed in sky blue dresses put their guns down.

“Move in, we don’t have all day” one of the armed men said.

“what if we don’t, this is a game after all and wouldn’t these guys be NPC's ? I am staying here, shoot me if you can” a random player said and begin to walk towards Mila and immediately, two of the armed men raised their weapons and shot at him, he fell down and the water around him start to turn red.

The rest of the players, including Garba, Mila , Lucy and Carson walked in a single file towards the van and just when they were about to enter, Garba turned around to look at the dead player in the water once more and saw just near the edge of the river, the ground slide open and what looks like one crocodile after another were elevated upwards by a metallic surface until there were seven crocodiles out, the immediately proceed to tear the dead body up, feeding on it and what Garba found the most boggling is that no other player even noticed.

(Back in the control room)

Dr. Akihiro has just had just finished looking at the codes on the large screen, he called for all the high ranking workers in the facility for a short briefing regarding the discovery of what he has told Nora earlier an impossible problem to solve that may hinder their experiment.

“We have an impossible problem to solve people, our firewalls have shown us that an intended program has launched itself and entered our local servers. This program has the capability to wipe our whole data clean and I for once do not want our VIP's in the mansion to know what is happening so as you may have noticed from the changes I just made to the rules of the game, we are skipping the next five stages and having the final game take place immediately. If we don’t, even if we cannot stop it from deleting the accumulated data, we can finish the program and copy the data elsewhere before it can establish itself as a bonafide entity in the server” Akihiro explained.

“But sir, cant we track down this program which I am sure is a malware and delete it instead, sounds more reasonable to do so than change our initial plan for the game” one of the staff said.

Akihiro turned around furiously, glaring at the staff for arguing and said.

“I assure you that this program is not a malware or virus and it knows more about programming, coding and cryptography than all of us here combined, if you want to try deleting it, go ahead and give that a try”

“But what is it then, sir?” the staff asked

“You do not have the clearance to know that! Now everyone straight to work, we have all the players currently en route the waiting hall.” Akihiro responded.

He turned to Nora and just pulled him by the hand to his table space.

“We are playing chess next and with this, we end the whole experiment, Neither of our VIP guests have an idea that we are changing the plan, I intentionally left out the part where we were supposed to have seven rounds of games to them for exactly this kind of situation, what we have just noticed entering our servers is no other than the MEDULLA program so we need to disconnect all access to the internet, I believe I can leave that job to you” he said.

“But isn’t MEDULLA the super computer at our Texas Headquarters?” Nora asked.

“it is, but it also runs another program, an artificial intelligence with the same name, the best in the world of I have to say” Akihiro responded and Nora just nodded his head in understanding and agreement, then quickly moved to his computer and started working.

(Department of Software engineering CALTECH)

Ababio and Reece have been typing and coding for the last two days, they have successfully infiltrated the Neuratechnologies headquarters servers located in Texas, in there, they have been copying and pasting files over again and again and again with the help of MEDULLA.

Reece has tasked MEDULLA to keep the firewalls of Neuratechnologies servers occupied as well as to keep decrypting the files that have already been copied.

After many hours of repeated copying and decryption, they finally found a file of interest and have MEDULLA c***k it open.

Inside they found a folder named A. Amida. On the inside, the file reads:

Dr. Akihiro Amida

Age: fifty seven, born in Kyoto Japan, attended the most prestigious university in the country and was the top of his class till graduation. He studied physiology for his major but immediately went back to read Neurobiology for his master’s degree. He graduated top of his class again. He applied for a research fund that the university grants to promising researchers in different field but lost to an American student who with similar qualifications but has background in computing rather than Neuroscience and that student was no other than Mallory Reece. Dr. Reece couldn’t be more surprised by this revelation.

Because Akihiro's father Mr. Amida has taken a lot of loan from loan sharks, he was hopping that his son would get the research grant so he can pay off his loan but lost the bid completely to the American.

A few days later, Amida left the university in Tokyo and moved to suburban Kyoto, where he started working for the yakuza ring that owned the loan sharks in the region. At first, he was helping them by making hallucinogenic drugs that they sell and after he finished praying his loan, he has already mastered the art of drug design and continued working for them to make his own money, but in his mind, Akihiro was performing secret experiments with dangerous hallucinogenic substances that can cause memory loss and possibly permanent brain injuries.

At first, he was known as the yakuza doctor that can make you forget a specific memory, he set up a facility having climbed the ranks of the yakuza, with money and people at his disposal, he started attending to people secretly with the promise of deleting a troubling memory, making them less forgetful and even making them smarter.

People from all over the country started putting themselves at his mercy but unknowingly to them, he was performing his own experiments on them, testing the effects of certain substances on their brain and cognitive function. And he would use a substance he has perfected to delete their memories so they would not remember what was going on or the fact that he experimented on them.

The local authorities in Kyoto found out about him and started raiding secret facilities one by one just to get him.

One day, his facility was raided and the leaders of his yakuza ring were all arrested, but Akihiro escaped by luck because he has gone to attend his father’s funeral. He escaped Kyoto and went to Tokyo to start his life over having lost his last remaining family.

In the nee city however, Akihiro was approached by a big drug conglomerate that makes and supplies different illegal drugs globally. He took them on their offer and in the process went back to school in Tokyo University. To be sure that he does not lose any other opportunity like the one he lost to Reece, Akihiro started to learn about computers and programming and in the process, he found his new source of joy, a new obsession that blinded him even more and he begins to pursue it with raw passion.

Unlucky for him, his past came chasing him and he was convicted for the crime he had committed back in Kyoto which included Illegal drug making, illegal drug prescription and illegal human experimentation.

This happened at the peak of his career when he has gained international recognition and has already been offered the rank of professorship by many universities in the world because of his achievements in Robotics and artificial brain signaling.

After he has been sentenced, The American government offered the Japanese government a systematic deal that they could not reject and in exchange, they were given custody of Dr. Akihiro Amida who was then extradited and freed in Exchange for working on Projects Ragnarok.

Dr. Reece and Ababio stared at each other in disbelief.

“MEDULLA, put priority on any file named Project Ragnarok” Reece said and immediately, MEDULLA pulled out a folder named 'PROJECT RAGNAROK'.