Alive

Chapter 3

Walter hasn't done anything.
The keyboard lays there innocently, unperturbed, and the RCA still sits there, unmoving, not reacting at all to what Walter had said.
This is very worrying to Walter.
Fuck! How had he not realized? Of course they were going to bug him! Fury crashes into his chest, choosing the side of insane rage.
'Not helping at all right now,' Walter thinks to himself as he tries desperately to think of a counter-attack that'll stop whatever process the virus, now identified on his laptop as <(meekly_follows)> , was going through. For now, it appears to be doing nothing, but he knows his two-faced lab companions much, much better than that. And he has to stop the process immediately before anything goes wrong.
His best guess is that they're doing a wipe on the RCA's physical memory, which will not only require Walter to take millions of years to rebuild the files and thus give them more time to search for the original prototype but also allow for them to have complete access to the shadows of the files that were deleted, so that they can build upon them and learn what he had so painstakingly recorded.
This, thinks Walter, simply is not going to happen.
Walter does everything he can to fight the virus, and over the process of three hours the process disbands, but it takes Walter that long, and even though he beat it that time he knows that <(meekly_follows)> isn't even close to gone.
In order to get the virus to stop he'd had to stop the robot almost fully, and midway through the last shutdown process (it would definitely have done the RCA some bad if he'd been fully shut down then immediately switched back on) and even that was a close dig, because if he had shut down the thing completely it was likely it'd spend the next day or two in a little 'coma' trying to fight the virus off with just his own immunities, which would have wasted much time. Walter needs to teach the thing, set it up correctly, activate FATE, and then set it on its own little way.
Walter thinks, now that the memory dump's been taken care of, the RCA is in prime condition for a setup. Now, the RCA was in a first stage shutdown, what with Walter having cancelled out of the other two, so he was only slightly aware of things... Walter puts him into the second shutdown phase so he won't feel much and will have no hardware conflicts while Walter is making little tweaks. He speaks to the robot knowing somewhere deep down in there he's being listened to.
Huh, what a nice thing it is to be heard.
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RCA ACTIVITY LOG:
<(Trojan_Horse)> process disbanded.
Process <(Gemini)> beginning.
(Fin)
Wait. Where am I now? Why can I not tell how much time has passed since I left the place with the old man? Walter, wasn't that his name?
'It is not your place to know his name,' a deep, ugly, and frightening voice deep inside me smugly says. Instinct. I knew it would be back again! I argued it all the way over to the old man's house, and I wasn't about to lose to instinct again.
'It is my place, his name was told to me. Thus I have complete right to know his name.'
The voice is obviously displeased. I get chills for seemingly no reason at all.
'It is not your place to know his name,' the deep voice persists, and I remind myself that it was all just me. Instinct is not an efficient thing to fight. I sigh and change the subject.
'Where are we, anyway?'
Instinct seems to sit back, relax from our previous conflict. He obviously wanted it to continue. Or, to make a small correction, I had. 'We're still in that old man's house.' I shake my head. 'Obviously we are not.' I can almost hear the booming voice smirk and say, 'what makes you say that?' I think for a second, collecting any and all data as quickly as I can about the current settings and surroundings of my body.
'No, nothing about the outside world changed, RCA. The only thing that changed is your level of mental realism.'
I look through all my settings but cannot find a single thing to allude to mental realism. He chuckles, a cruel, terrifying sound, and I shiver. 'This is not a simple setting, RCA. This is a way of being.' I understand now. He means probably in a state of sleep. Sleep? Not available modes for the last two models... Walter is a very smart man.
I have a feeling that if every model in the third version had what I had, there would be much mayhem indeed.
I doubt Walter would want that to happen.
I'm about to speak to Instinct again when he up and disappears. I am thrust into a deeper state of oblivion.
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Walter sits, pondering by the RCA, his proud life's work. Though RCA is bound to be different when he wakes up, a bit more masculine, a little bit more determined, Walter's task remains the same. The first problem: a name.
He searches through his name database but can't find anything. Eventually he tires, setting the RCA down on the couch with the laptop plugged in nearby, preparing him, buffering and decluttering his scripts, over and over. If Walter has any shot at rebellion everything must be played correctly. He sighs and shuffles upstairs, prepares for bed, flops onto a fluffy mattress, and shuts his eyes gently.
His eyes open to a blinding golden light.
Does Walter even want to look? Not really, but curiosity overtakes him and he has to take a quick peek.
His eyes slowly adjust to the light and he sees her...
Oh, Julie, he remembers, and now she's in his reach... He misses her so much, he'll finally have her back again. But when she notices him her face becomes stern. 'You shouldn't come any closer,' she says. Walter doesn't care, he embraces her warmly. 'What did I say?' Julie said, as she and the rest of the prairie slipps into nothingness and he's suddenly falling into a pit of black.
As he is falling, he can feel that the bottom is close but it never does end. He spends eternity there...

Walter awakes hyperventilating.
What had woken him up so suddenly and violently...? He isn't sure, he can't remember anything...
But then a loud clang sounds from the kitchen. Oh god. Walter sits up and looks at the alarm clock. Apparently he'd slept in an extra two hours than usual. Strange, because Walter only feels a lot more groggy. He can feel his bad mood coming on again... But underneath that was also a general excitement for the night ahead, when he'd activate FATE and set himself free... He smiled to himself absently and walked down the narrow staircase.
The first thought in his mind was, 'how the fuck do you melt the floor while you're cooking?'
There were pieces of eggshell everywhere and mildly undesirable-looking scrambled eggs dumped onto two plates on the edge of the counter, not to mention the mess and the melted floor... but on the bright side they smelled pretty okay..
The RCA gave him a smile and said, with an edge of nervousness in his voice, 'good morning, Walter!'
And Walter laughed.
The RCA looked rather confused by his reaction but laughed along and then said, 'I-I'm sorry, I'll clean this up, I know, it's a real big mess...'
This was going to be a very happy day, Walter knew. A very happy day indeed...
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