#orbit chapter 6

And she'd been three seconds from defending him.

Oh the lords above had some stupid sense of goddamn humour. That corporate prick was going to kill not one person but two. And then the very person who'd convinced her to maybe try to forgive Yoshiro... had turned out to be a computer screen. And also evil. And a humongous dick.

What a fucking joke. Shinsuke Tsujii and Hayate Gacchiri were both lumps of trash and on top of that, Yoshiro Kimura had still killed Himeko. Whatever Valu did it wasn't exactly legal and Fumiko had constantly skirted the line of the rules and had even been threatened. It was a hard thing, knowing how to treat people. Back on... well, back on Earth, back in those days it was different. She had friends, sure, but a lot of people found her annoying and egocentric. They were hardly wrong. But she could still kind of work with those people. These guys? Well... she had to but could she? Shinobu frowns. She'd have to make it work. Though she had no intention of going easy on Hayate if he had the poor sense to enter her line of vision.

Still standing around thinking of violent manuevers she'd like to perform on people would do her no good so she went off exploring. One place in partiular caught her eye despite it being rather grotesque in nature. The mortuary. She ad a feeling she just had to know what was in there. Better the truth than living in ignorance any longer.

She'd seen a lot of bodies at this point. Horrific bodies. Brain tissue missing, heads caved in, artificial limbs detached... honestly she'd always had a strong stomach from horror movies anyway and when shit needed to get done she was going to get it down. Shinobu enters the mortuary and glances around. The smell chokes her, fills her lungs with stale sickliness that makes her mouth tighten. She throws off the tarps and looks at the bodies which are god... riddled with bullets and then some. They're all adults... who were these guys? The staff? Is this Shitsuke's doing again? God, she can't wait to wreck his ass. She cricks her neck to the side and gives the room one last once over before leaving. That ain't any place for anybody with a pulse. It's as she's leaning on the wall outside the room she sees a passerby and lifts a hand in greeting. It's hard to see who it is from here.

Now with the knowledge (or at least some of it) of where the enigmatic Pandora had been during her disappearance, the nine remaining students once again headed to a trial room, this one bigger and more grand than any of the others they’d been in, in order to find her killer.

Almost immediately, Fumiko questions CAL about why the cause of death was not listed for Pandora. He entertains the question for about .5 seconds before demanding them get to work in figuring out who’d done this. In that vein, the students, led in this by Yoshiro and Kaoru, decide that despite the incident directly after the murder, and the one before that, Hayate isn’t the culprit. This launches into a short discussion about Pandora, and Valu reveals that her whereabouts were the vents. 

This segues into Shinobu asking about evidence, and Kaoru reveals that she knows what killed the paranormal investigator: a maintenance robot found in the cybernetics lab, with blood, bone, and brains on its drill. She also says that she believes someone took control of said robot in order to do that, and Shinobu points out that Shinsuke is a programmer, to which he responds in an obviously irritated way. Valu interjects, saying that while there is a chance it is him, there’s also a chance it’s not, and she wants to know what was up with the dead rabbit with its blood on Pandora’s shirt.

While Shinobu and Shinsuke bicker, Kaoru brings up that based on the note found in Pandora’s hand, at some point last night, the oxygen on the ship stopped working, and Fumiko adds that she knows why: there’s a weedkiller on board that kills people within 90 minutes but stays in the air for hours. Kaoru remembers that Yoshiro told her he passed out during the lockdown only to wake up in his room, with the speculation that Pandora must have taken him there. Again, due to the factor of the weed killer, suspicion turns to Shinsuke and again he snaps at the person who brings it up. CAL reveals that the maintenance robots’ shutdowns are hardcoded and for a brief moment suspicion lands on him. It doesn’t last, but Fumiko comes to a conclusion: whoever the administrator is is the one who is behind Pandora’s death.

In the middle of a discussion on where exactly Pandora had been killed, Yoshiro, who had been mostly quiet until now, brings something out, while CAL tells them that the robots’ tools shut down in the presence of humans. This only confuses the discussion more, before Yoshiro finally holds up a book as he declares there might have been another person. Or that the book was Pandora’s, and that’s what they finally decide on. Inside the book are each of the living kids’ names, and a short message for them:

Tucked into the journal is a sheet of paper with somewhat frantically scribbled words on it. They seem to address all the others They’re brief, concise, and read as follows:

"Kimura - Perhaps you never hated me after all. Haku - You showed kindness. If it wasn’t a trick, I am grateful. Nalak - I appreciated the gifts. I will miss you. Hayashi - You are a good person. Survive. Tsujii - I am glad that somebody at least is still friends with Kimura. Hamasaki - I apologize for the fight we had. Uetsuji - You can keep her safe. You can keep them all safe. Fujioka - They don’t hate you. None of them do. Gacchiri-san - All is forgiven.”

After the note is passed around, the subject of conversation returns to the weedkiller, and the idea that whoever had set it off wanted to kill them all comes up. Kaoru suggests that the people who had sabotaged the space station had done it. 

There’s more back and forth, and CAL interjects, laughing because they haven’t even found the cause of death yet, and that gives Kaoru an idea: if the robots couldn’t activate around living humans, and Pandora had been drilled by the robot, then the weedkiller must have been the cause of death. 

In light of this new information, the blame is once more put on Shinsuke, and this time, he doesn’t handle it was well, still insisting that Hayate must be the one responsible. He falls into another coughing fit, this time coughing up a little blood before wiping it on his pants and continuing to deny everything. Then, Fumiko asks him if his organs are failing, to which he responds with angry confusion. 

Yoshiro approaches him, trying to soothe the sick boy, but Shinsuke’s condition is only worsening, it seems. What Fumiko had said sparks something with Kaoru, and she pulls out a whole sheaf of notes, flipping through them until she comes upon something that she proceeds to read out loud:

"Known symptoms: fainting, coughing, sneezing in the initial phase. As the infection progressed, symptom development accelerates rapidly. End stage symptoms include liver, lung, heart, and kidney failure. The terminal stage can be reached in under a week. Attempted treatment and immunity research has yielded some results. Experimental treatments have had a 50% success chance in animal subjects. Although the disease cannot be cured, we have found at artificial statis can postpone all effects indefinitely. BREAKTHROUGH: heightened stress levels dramatically increase antibody creation rate in both infected and immunized test subjects."

CAL demands they get back to figuring out what and who had killed Pandora, but most of them are still focused on Shinsuke, who doubles over coughing… but underneath it, it almost sounds like laughing. Discussion continues, just for a brief moment, before Shinsuke’s laugh-coughing reaches a fever pitch, and with harsh gasps and wheezes between words and sentences, he jovially expresses disbelief about how he can’t believe they’d bought it. “Suckers.” He whispers as he falls to his knees. He does not move.

And then the lights go out.

[ ♫♫♫ ]

At first, there’s nothing but the various babbling of the students. Then, the screen where Caligula had previously been lights back up.

The screen is completely blue apart from the white text that pops up.

ＥＲＲＯＲ：　ＡＤＭＩＮ　ＤＥ－ＳＹＮＣＥＤ．．． ＬＯＡＤＩＮＧ．．．　ｔｓｕｊｉｉｓｈｉｎｓｕｋｅ．ｅｘｅ．．．　

Below that, the status bar is empty, but it rapidly fills, and once the bar reaches 100%, the screen dims again, and a sickeningly familiar sound starts up, laughter, now free of the coughing and hacking, that they thought had died with the software programmer. The laughter permeates the room, the halls, the entire space station, before the screen lights back up and the new admin smirks as he glares out and down to the remaining kids, still laughing. At them, of course.

"I got you assholes good, didn’t I? Of fuckin’ course I did! I’m that damn good! God, you fucking morons! Who else could it have been? Of course Gacchiri was a frame, the bullet didn’t even match his gun! Only someone as skilled as myself could’ve pulled this off, and as a matter of fact, I did! And you fuckers bought all of it, ate it up like the stupid animals you are! Oh, Tsujii-kun couldn’t have done it, he’s too inept, he’s too nice! Fuckin’ fool ALL OF YOU MEAT SACKS!"

As the remaining living students express various degrees of shock, anger, fear, and sadness, Shinsuke reveals that he had killed Pandora, partially because she had absconded into the vents and released a bunch of information to them by way of unlocking doors and breaking things, partially because fuck her. The weedkiller was indeed the cause of death, and he had framed Hayate, in addition to starting the mutual killing and taking over George in the first place. The AI, he continues, was wrought by way of the HAD-35 system, where he uploaded a copy of himself, similar but different to the ones the rest of the dead kids had, and made it admin. 

At one point, Valu vaguely threatens him, and he obviously responds by lowering a gun, maybe even the same one that killed Yuki, from the ceiling and aiming directly at her. The threats subside soon afterward. 

After many shouted questions and demands for answers, Shinsuke tells them he’s not going to kill them (yet, at least), that question time is over, and they should skedaddle (and maybe read up on some of the files Pandora had given her life for) in the meantime. 

CALIGULA FILE

Victim: [DATA NOT FOUND] Kuromori 

Place of Body: Viewing platform

Time of Death: 12:42 AM

A familiar but unfriendly voice rings out once more. 

"Don't think I forgot about the motive, kids. The filthy traitor among you, the scum who was working with good ol' me all along, that would be..." 

After the strange events of last night, you are relieved to discover the next morning that the lights in your room have returned to normal, and that the door will once again open. The strange hissing noise has stopped. You feel a sense of relief. 

That sense of relief is quickly replaced with a sense of eerie dread, as you walk out of your room and are confronted with an eerie silence. Attempting to contact CAL-19014 does nothing. Starting to panic, you begin to make your way around the station in search of someone else. 

Eventually you find them, the rest of the students aboard, in the viewing gallery, gathered around 

It's late, perhaps 11 or 12 at night. You're in your room, ready to sleep, when something... odd happens. There is a loud click from the door, and the panel where you would normally scan your ID card to get out glows a bright red. No matter what you try, the door will not open.

A familiar and hated voice fills the air once more. 

"Hello, smelly, pungent, disgusting IMBECILES! How is trusting each other and having "friendships" turning out for you? Hopefully not well, because it's everyone favourite time, motivation time, from your favourite motivational speaker, Caligula!"

"Are you fuckers aware that one of you has been in contact with /yours truly/ since day one? That's right, one of you little pieces of shit is a sneaky sneaky traaaaaaaaitoooooooor! If you want to find out which one of your fuckers is, as we speak, in fucking CAHOOTS with me, all you gotta do is off someone. And chop chop, seriously, where's the fun in just watching you all chat and form emotional bonds n' shit?" 

The screens of the station flicker on to reveal your very favourite murderous artificially intelligent bastard. He seems tense, as he has been since the recent trial. All is obviously not well in evil-psycho-AI-land. However, he's sure as hell not willing to show that. 

"Look here, meat maggots. You're all being chummy-chummy. It's adorable. Real sweet. But you know what I want here? I want you guys to start fuckin' killing each other again. So let me tell you a little something. Twenty-two people were originally living on this little station. One of them was old Moony, Tsukino Eita."