Codename: Angelus

Chapter 2 - Error 400

The wall-wide holoscreen flashed a ominous bright red.

It kept repeating the same message: ERROR 400.

Naoko was mad. Why did it have to happen on her shift?

Joshua was no help. Nothing semeed to frazzle him. No matter what happened, he always semeed unfazed.

{stupid NPC* — she thought to herself.}

She was frantic. ERROR 400 meant a Test Subject had fallen onto a different layer of reality, out of the immediate reach of the backup system, posing a threat to the whole double-layered infrastructure.

And it wasn’t an isolated case either. They could still compensate, yet at this pace it was a matter of time before the fail-safe mechanism was triggered and the Macrophages became active, throwing the whole scenario out of whack. It was too soon!

Naoko vented her angst on Joshua. He wouldn’t get back at her anyway.

His subroutines weren't *that* sophisticated, though he behaved like a decent Human character.

“Idiot! This is all your fault! You dumbass! I told not to let them run any SimGame while the server was undergoing maintenance! Now the SimGame is running on top of the original simulation! We lost track of the Dormant! Start tracking! I want her ID A.S.A.P.! How’s Milla?”

Naoko and her twin siter Kaori could only trace a handful of kids taking part in the Experiment. Some of them had the chips Naoko modded herself before she was caught by the Organization and forcibly put in cold sleep and connected to the System. Kids with mod chips retained their original memories. But the others were tricked into thinking the whole “the world had been devastated crap” was real.

Camilla was one of them. She genuinely believed that the world was no longer suitable for organic life and that there was no life beyond the shelter. That was what made her into such a reliable Angel: her *mission* was all that mattered to her.

Milla was still diving the moment the accident happened. The machine rejected her as a fail safe measure and forcibly stopped the dive. This put a considerable strain on her mind. It was dangerous to force an Angel’s reawakening like that because of the neural backlash.

Doctor Quinto had her moved to the clinic and was monitoring her.

The doctor’s face poppep up on a smaller screen on the bottom right side of the holoscreen which spread across the central wall of the control room, which would usually display screens from inside the simulation and the lines of code for the main running program — which was actually a simulation inside *the* simulation. It was mind-boggling even to Naoko who helped build the System — it was beyond her wildest nightmares that she would become trapped in there herself.

She turned her attention to the Doctor.

“I advise she should skip her next shift” said Quinto. “I told her to rest.”

Then back to Joshua who was struggling to track their lost Dormant’s ID.

“You dumbass! You still haven’t tracked down that freakin’ Dormant?”

It would be logic for Joshua to snap at her at that point and he did.

“I only have two hands, you know. Why don’t you work on the code?”

The screen, except for the portion that hosted the Doctor’s perplexed face, which Naoko dismissed after thanking her for taking care of Milla; and another portion on which Joshua was working on the code, was still flashing red, repeating the error message. It was unnerving.