Sonic: REMgaged

Chapter 16

"I think it happened the first time I saw you," said Ennis.

They were sitting on a cushioned bench by the windows, much as she and Patrick had done earlier. But here, in this empty office space at the top of the building, they were quite alone. Alex sat with her legs tucked beneath her. Ennis sat sideways on the bench with his legs crossed. Their hands were clasped between them as Ennis gazed into her eyes. It was as though Alex Parker's big brown eyes had the ability ground him, to keep him from turning back into the machine he'd once been.

"That Chaos Energy in you... it sparked something in me. A... consciousness, if you will. Though I didn't understand what it was at the time."

"You had never been exposed to Chaos Energy before?"

"It's not that," said Ennis, shaking his head. "After all, I'd been exposed to all seven Chaos Emeralds when Master... when... when my father initiated Chaos Control to return here, via the REMgage. Perhaps that's when it truly started messing with my normal operations."

"Functional parameters have been altered," intoned Alex. It was something he had said to her earlier, shortly before Ennis had returned to full consciousness.

"Exactly. But it was so subtle, I didn't catch it. Not even my father, for all his brilliance, caught it at first. That was the precipitating event. I think it must have created a vulnerability in my programming. And you, Alex... you exploited that vulnerability. Not intentionally, no," he said, offering her a small smile when she opened her mouth to argue. "But that Chaos Energy within you, and just your... your humanity... The first time I saw you dive at your swim meet, it triggered in me – in Sage – compulsions that I hadn't felt since I was Ennis Boddick. You were beautiful and I wanted you."

Alex flushed and averted her gaze. "You couldn't have worded that less bluntly, could you?"

"I'm sorry, Alex," said Ennis. "I'm not trying to be crass. What I mean is... I wanted you the way a drowning man wants air. The way a bird wishes it had fins with which to swim, or a fish wishes to fly. I wanted to escape the prison of my programming and my cybernetic body the way a lame person wants to walk, or the blind wish to see, or the deaf wish to hear. I wanted to breathe you, to taste you, to be with you. You were the light shining down the path to my freedom; freedom from this shell," he gestured disgustedly to himself, "I've been trapped in."

"But you tried to—"

"Yes," he said, as though he already knew what she was about to say. "And I'm sorry, Alex. I never meant to hurt you. But when we first captured you and I put you into that doze and you sang that song by The Cars, it triggered something in me. I think that's when I started to remember, though even then, I was confused by what I was thinking and feeling. Those flashes of memory, to me, were just a... malfunction."

"Derelict memory files that refused to remain derelict," said Alex, echoing something else he'd said earlier.

"Yes," Ennis nodded. "And when the Master wanted me to draw out your Chaos Energy by exploiting your emotions... I decided to do it my way."

"By frightening me," she accused.

"Yes... and no. I didn't know what you might feel, only that it would register as fluctuations in your Chaos Energy. I had to see if my master's... my father's theory was correct. And so I needed to do something to create a spike in your Chaos Energy. But by then, that was ancillary to my own selfish desire. I wanted to test my own theory. I wished to investigate the troubling change you'd wrought in me, to see what would happen when I acted on my compulsion; a compulsion, I'm embarrassed to admit, was very much Ennis Boddick's."