Chapter 63: Return Of The Forgotten Disciple
He shivered slightly as he could feel the piercing gaze of those he passed by on him, their eyes staring daggers that threatened to reach his very soul, but he shut them all out. He was never the subject matter of anyone, and when he was, he always seemed to be a subject of ridicule. Alto was largely unbothered by this, but that did not stop him from feeling awkward. Everyone seemed to look at him like he was some foreign object; others used his appearance as a cause to start a conversation. He could hear whispers such as:
"Who is he?" one asked at one time.
"Dunno, but he seems awfully fine to be in this part of the building. Maybe he’s some technician or something," a grumpy officer who seemed not to care about the discussion said to his body counterpart.
Alto, on the other hand, found out that his hearing had improved to some extent; he was able to hear much better than he usually could, his ears catching whispers from afar like they were said directly to him. He smiled as he walked around, stretching his tired legs. What he wished currently was to go outside of the facility and see the sun, have a bit of fresh air, but he did not have the clearance for such leisure. He wondered if he was a prisoner in the mech division because they did an obvious job at making it very obvious.
He remembered what Abigail had said about the planet dying and the mech division doing nothing to help despite being on the planet for a very long time. Wasn’t the goal of the mech division to protect human life, or did they have an ulterior motive instead? There was more to the mech division than he knew, more than he wanted to know. Slowly, Alto’s mind was piecing together bits of something solid, something concrete. He remembered how the mech engineers had called the mech designer department a waste of money—literally budget wasters—but in a way, it was true since they did not build a mech. Even the professor had said it herself—why would she build a mech for a planet that did not go to war?
As Alto took the next turn down a hall, he thought to himself, "They don’t go to war. I rarely see anyone leave, yet their mechs need constant repairs despite rarely leaving the division grounds. Where do the mechs go then? Something is going on here, and I think the professor knows about it." The thought that he did not realize this till his intelligence got a boost from the mech designer software caused him to feel a bit low, but he soon got over it and started to think about what Marie had told him before she and her fleet had left the planet.
"They were investigating the mech division and planning to shut it down? Apparently, their investigation did not go as planned. There is something here they all seem to be after. Something more important than the people they’re sworn to protect. This neglect led to there being so many orphans, and yet they still farm us for potential X gene carriers. What a corrupt world we live in."