Chaos in the Making

- Chapter 1 : Tick Tock -

~~~For friends who have read Fish and Chips: this story takes place before Kaeo was born~~~

The room was quiet. The only noise to be heard in the all-blue room was the quiet ticking of the clock.

Tick-tock-tick-tock.

The silence was deafening. It pressed the life out of all living things.

In the corner, he stirred.

His hair fell over his eyes as another twitch jerked his neck to the side. Stupid virus. It made him twitch and turned his words to gibberish.

And so they kept him in this room.

There was no furniture. It was all empty, except for that stupid clock. He tried breaking it, but it refused to stop ticking. Besides, it was his only way of knowing how long he had been in there. Four hours.

Tick-tock-tick-tock.

Kedlin stood up and walked toward the vaulted door. It had eight locks on it, fingerprint recognition, and face recognition. The scientists said they were keeping him in there for his own safety, but he wondered if they were scared of him.

They didn't like it when he could figure out their questions in only a minute. It wasn't his fault they had downloaded multiple search engines, calculators, and programs into his chip. He often couldn't help but calculate the solutions to their mile-long equations or begin thinking of solutions for their technological problems.

He touched the door gently. It was thick, no doubt heavy.

An idea popped into his head.

He reached up for the big bandage on the side of his head and began pulling it off. He winced as it tugged at his hair.

The bandage fell to the floor, the inside covered in red. He was always bleeding. The doctors—or scientists—had put a machine on his arm that gave him more blood to replace what was constantly dripping from the hole in his head.

He wiped the blood off his face that had already dripped down from his temple, and reached into the gaping hole. Inside was a series of wires. In the back, behind all those wires, was a box, the size of a large coin. The scientists called it the Chip. It was what let him function. The Chip was his brain. He didn't have one of those pink, squishy, gross brains. He had a machine in his head.

He grabbed one of the wires and pulled. It tugged on the Chip, and on the side of his head. He relaxed, then pulled harder. It snapped out, leaving a green wire in his bloodied hand.

He pushed the green wire into the first lock and jiggled it around, following the WikiHow website pulled up in his mind.

The lock clicked and unlocked. He took it off the door and put it on the floor gently. He didn't want anyone to hear him.

He unlocked the second, third, fourth, fifth...and paused.

Footsteps echoed in the hallway outside his door.

"...newer model. The virus is spreading. If we continue to work on him, it will spread to our computers and all data will be lost."

"Yes, but...he is not a machine. We can't simply turn him off. He is a boy."

"We can just simply turn him off. That is the nature of the Chip. We might as well do it now."

"Hush! He might hear!"

He heard no more of the conversation. He didn't need to. They were going to turn him off and make a newer model. A better one. One that didn't get viruses every other day or switch languages accidentally.