To make things worse, Jay fuckinghatedme now. He thought I’d betrayed him. He didn’t know that I was forced to endure regular brain scans so Luke could use me to spy on his employees.
I’d gotten pretty good at keeping most of the important stuff away from my father, but some things often slipped through, especially if they were emotionally charged.
When Jay told me he thought he might have found a way to remove the chips, I couldn’t keep that memory hidden, and it ruined us all.
My fault.
It wasmyfault Jay was locked in a cage like an animal.
It was my fault that Luke and Dr. Grey were testing underdeveloped biotech on him like a fucking lab rat.
There wasn’t much I could do to help him while I was chipped. I couldn’t leave campus, and I couldn’t go against a direct order from Luke.
It took me ages to figure out how I was going to get Jay out of this mess.
The idea had come to me one day, when I had been wishing I still had NOVA to talk to.
Suddenly, it hit me.
I didn’t have any direct orders regarding operating the campus AI. Luke didn’t think I was smart enough to be a threat to any sort of infrastructure… but before she’d been eliminated, NOVA and I had spent long nights together trying to untangle how the chips worked.
I wasn’t a tech wiz by any means, but I knew more than I let on.
I knew that NOVA’s servers operated off campus somewhere, and I knew if I could knock out the power on campus, TECHA would go down, and the doors would be open for NOVA to get back in.
So that’s just what I did.
Letting myself into The Cave one night, I dismissed the guard on duty, telling him to take a short break.
After the man left, I wandered deeper into The Cave and found Jay unconscious in his cell.
He’d had a particularly rough day in Dr. Grey’s chair, and as much as I hated what they were doing to him, it was better he was unconscious for what I was about to do.
I didn’t have many strict rules around visiting Jay or entering his cell. I’d managed to do a pretty good job of convincing my father that I was on his side, and he sometimes had me help get Jay strapped into the surgical chair.
He liked that it clearly hurt Jay to think I’d betrayed him, so when he was feeling particularly vicious, he loved rubbing it in.
Seeing how thin and broken Jay was lying on the dirty cot in his shitty cell, the familiar feelings of helplessness and rage began to build in me.
I ordered TECHA to cut the cameras to The Cave, and raided Dr. Grey’s bio-chem fridge until I found several vials of adrenaline. I’d seen him use these on Jay countless times before to wake him back up after the testing became too much for him, and he finally passed out.
Gritting my teeth, I snatched one up and stalked back to Jay’s cell.
I needed to hurry. The longer the cameras were out in here, the larger the risk someone would come to see why they’d gone dark.
It was late, so security was at its lightest, but I only had one chance for this and didn’t want to fuck it up.
Taking advantage of the fact that he was out cold, I cut Jay’s chip out of his arm as quickly as I could so he could have a real chance of escape. I did my best to keep it clean and stitched him up as quickly as possible, but it was definitely a hack job, and I prayed to a god I didn’t believe in that I hadn’t done any permanent damage to his arm in my rush.
Then, finally, I ripped the power cables out of TECHA’s stack and shot Jay up with the boost of adrenaline.
He was feral as he came to, and I don’t think he recognized me, or was even able to properly register that I was there at all.
“Run, Jay! Get to the cabin your dad used to take you to when you were a kid,” I barked at him.
“Wh-what? I can’t… leave… trapped…” His eyes were glazed, and he was glancing around the lab wildly, clearly dazed and confused.
“NOVA cut the power and took out TECHA; she came back to save you,” I lied. This way, if he got caught and they ripped back into his head, they hopefully would just see fuzzy memories of NOVA instead of me.
