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“If real is what you can feel, smell, taste and see, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.”
----------PART TWO: A WORLD WITHIN----------
Onboard the S.S. King’s Ransom: Somewhere in the South Pacific
(ATTN: Blunt, Ego, Katanga, Roche, Unicorn)
Lobo grins widely, adjusting his captain’s hat. The smell of salt on the air is nothing short of breathtaking. Everything about being here makes him feel… right, somehow. The creak of wooden boards under his feet, the crow of passing gulls. The misty spray of water on his face as he peers over a hand carved railing.
Cain feels a bit restless. The purpose of this side voyage still coming across as wasteful. Navigator, he thought. He had been reduced to a conspicuous passenger, with little more than a weak title to identify him. At one time, he captained his own vessel–before most of these kids were unplugged. His thoughts drifted to family, to his purpose. A purpose that still lingered, kept burning in secret while the ‘navigator’ performed his chores.
Wraith impatiently eyes the captive. Refusing to play ‘dress up’, he instead appears in full Matrix-ready gear. Out of idle curiosity, he eyes a row of docile cannons, poised to fire into the vast sea. Fuses nearly begging to be lit, sails daring to be climbed, with a dagger clenched in his teeth. But instead, he was relegated to Lobo’s cat and mouse antics. Impatience seemed to grow on the young man like kudzu.
Blaze looks on, enjoying the feeling of freedom that the open sea seemed to offer. He watches as Lobo relishes in his task, and smiles a bit. The illusions of the machine world were still pretty convincing. Even as he stares at the endless rolling waves, there seems to be no glitches, no imperfections beyond what mother nature herself would have ascribed to the billows.
Edge is perhaps the most like Lobo, enjoying the saturating circumstances. He smirks at his captive as he holds the rapier out, nearly poking into the back of the bound Monarch. The youthful would-be pirate glares at the portly prisoner, glancing to Lobo every now and then with a “Give me the word, Captain,” look in his eyes.
Though the bodies of these five men really rest in monitoring stations onboard their respective hovercraft, their minds had are linked into the construct together. Their goal, to extract information from the fat man in front of them, as he stood teetering on the edge of an old-style plank. Here in the loading program, the men are safe from Agents and rogue programs. The advantage is theirs.
Though really sedated into a coma-like state, the Monarch appears in the construct alert and very much aware of the situation. His capture and interrogation were to take place in Zion. Not in some fantasy of his captor’s making. But a Sentinel alert kept the Gilgamesh and Enkidu at a distance. And so, it was on the joint crew to ascertain Monarch’s associations, the location of his contacts, and the nature of his unnaturally powered henchman.
The fat man stood on the plank’s tip, confused and afraid, shocked into silence. No longer sure of where his mind and body rested.