Chapter 10: Researching the Past

"..."

"..."

"..."

*Crack*

"Whoops! I think I broke my PDA- Hah." Dahr was scratching the back of his head while awkwardly laughing. "So uh, I take it you don't have a bank account?"

"Uh, Yeah - no I don't."

"Well, Uh- I, again, won't ask about it. Lucky charms usually come with some kind of catch after all! But that being the case, I should hold onto the money for us then. If someone else finds out about that, you could get into a lot of trouble." Dahr put his cracked PDA down on the table and stepped back towards Kassix, "I couldn't even tell it wasn't legit though, must have been done by someone who knows their stuff." He was examining the ID from several steps away, seemingly slightly more wary of his new best friend.

"Yeah, that's fine with the money I guess, but is it possible to pay for cash with some things? I'd like to actually, you know, be able to buy things I need." If he had to rely on Dahr to purchase everything for him, Kassix didn't know if he'd be able to put up with having a middleman for everything.

Dahr took a seat and picked his cracked PDA back up, only its screen was cracked and was still usable. He began clicking through it, looking for a specific bit of information. "There's actually one thing we can do, someone using a company card to make purchases wouldn't be odd. I can go register a name for a company and get you a card if you'd like, but we will be billed every month for it. As long as we figure out some sort of income it shouldn't be too much of an issue though, just registering a name won't cost us too much a month."

"Well there's not much else to do if that's what we have to do, also where did you get the PDA?" Kassix was looking at the device curiously, wondering how much it must have costed Dahr.

"Oh this thing? I picked it up right after selling our goods, they are pretty cheap honestly, only around 250 credits. I'll pick you one up while I go register a company for us."

Kassix nodded to that, "That'd be great, thanks. I'll also need to get some actual clothes to fit as well, but I'll wait until you get back with the card. If you don't need that one at the moment, could I borrow it while you are out though?" He wanted to try and answer some of the questions he had swirling around in his head for awhile now.

"Sure, I'll get it fixed later as well, but here you go" Dahr handed it over after closing the webpage he had up. Dahr then got up and stretched while looking at the door. "I'll go ahead and get that taken care of then." Without another word Dahr left with a smile and a wave.

*****

*Current Inventory*

Chimera Box

A.I. Pet - Type Unknown

PDA

~19,000 Credits total left over

Old tattered pants and spare shirt

Dahr had left and was gone for several hours, giving Kassix plenty of time to search for information regarding himself and his situation. The first thing that he looked up was his own name, and surprisingly there was a number of articles. His name was apparently rare, but not non-existent, the most recent article he could find was about a missing child who shared his name. He quickly clicked on this article and began reading through, but there was a glaring issue that showed itself. The article was from 52 years prior, and from skimming it, the person was apparently never found and presumed dead.

After searching a couple other articles, he hadn't come across anything else worth wasting his time on. The articles were too old, and they didn't have enough resemblance to his current situation. The next thing he could think of that bothered him the most was Allie, they hadn't even tried to contact him since their last conversation. He figured someone like that would have to be a hacker of some sorts. He tried various different versions with her name, and terms related to hacking but couldn't find a single thing.

"She can't just not exist, so she must just not be well known or something." He began looking for posts about signs being changed to show giant arrows on a red background and finally felt satisfied that he could find some sort of information. He hadn't been the only one to notice the signs apparently as there were multiple posts about people asking if it was some sort of campaign that hadn't been revealed yet, or if it was a glitch in the system. No one really brought up the idea of someone hacking into it, which was curious enough that Kassix made an account and made a post asking "What if it was a hacker, is there anyone good enough to hack those public systems?"

Now with two strikes and a foul, He turned his attention away from those forums and began looking up information about Dahr, and he finally found something actually concrete. "Dahr Fortshcritt, heir to the Fortshcritt company dead at eighteen." Age of the article was one year ago, and having a cold feeling rush across his spine, decided to click on it. The first picture was indeed a picture of Dahr, the same one that had left a few hours before.

"...Why would he be considered dead?" He continued reading through the article and discovered the cause of death was an industrial accident, there were comments speculating foul play, but there was not enough evidence or reason to believe that was the case for the law to actually get involved.

Deciding to look a little deeper into Dahr's past, found an article discussing the company, its moves, and where it would go from there with the young heir's death.

"The Fortshcritt company, an upstart of recent times that is quickly becoming a leader in the world of cybernetic enhancements and design. They have improved old systems and designed new ones bringing the highest design of cybernetics onto the market. Just before the young heir's death, they had just released the new T14 model bionic arm replacement. This new design shows improvement over the T13 models of its competitor by nearly 25% more strength and speed, without the degradation on connecting natural, or lesser graded joints seen on other proposed T14 model designs of other companies.

...

-Despite all of these improvements and business moves, there is the question as to how this accident could have occurred with all of the safety measures involved at the Fortshcritt factories. There was speculations that the old titan of cybernetics, I-Bionics, was attempting to buyout Fortshcritt and bring them under their umbrella, however no progress had been made over the two years of negotiations leading up to the death of the heir. Most of the speculations that I-Bionics could have hard feelings over the lack of willingness to budge, but resources say they pulled out their attempts a good 6 months before Dahr's accident."

Kassix just leaned back after closing the page and put the PDA down. "I- Don't know what I expected, but it wasn't really that. Thinking about the article normally, it definitely seems like it could be fishy, but there doesn't seem any reason to actually investigate. However, most people don't know that Dahr isn't dead, which is what makes those articles so suspicious. Did Dahr fake his death? Did someone try to kill him and fail? And if they did, why him?" He couldn't wrap his head around the reason why either one would be the case.

"Either way, I won't ask Dahr about it since we promised not to ask about our pasts, but it does make me feel better knowing that he is someone that doesn't exactly want to be found." Kassix was thinking for a second before something stuck out to him as wrong. "If he really is Dahr, then they would know he's alive since he's been using his ID, wouldn't they?" Kassix ran his hand through his hair annoyed. "There's way to many if's around him, and I feel like I need to be more careful around him. I already messed up and let find out my ID is fake, although Allie said that can be fixed though. I wonder if he would buy the PDA actually being busted if I get it fixed and let him scan it again."

Deciding to shelf the topic of Dahr and his own mistakes for the moment, he decided to look up both the Chimera box, and his new A.I. pet. The Chimera box came back with no results, as expected, and the A.I pet came back with an overabundance of results. Far too many to look through and over 20% of them had the same shape as his.

"I'll probably just have to figure that one out when I get a brain interface, huh." He put the pet back away and decided to stop using the PDA for now. He didn't really get any answers and only multiplied the amount of questions he had, and his head was starting to hurt.

Dahr returned a while after Kassix had already opted to try to sleep off the pain in his head. As soon as Kassix got into his bed, he was out and didn't look to be waking up anytime soon. He was much more exhausted than he felt, and this was the first time he'd slept in a bed. He had passed out immediately. Dahr gave a small smile seeing Kassix able to sleep peacefully, and left the money card on the table for him. Dahr proceeded to also opt for sleep, as the day was quickly coming to an end.