"Leif..." Porter held up his own hand and tentatively placed it against the cold metal of Sigma's. There was a collective holding of breath from those watching as the meeting's weight rippled through the room, bouncing off walls until it returned to the two in the centre. "Your name is Leif."
"And your name is Porter." The two stood across from each other. Sigma stood nearly half a foot taller than body, his mechanized body overshadowing the tall teenager. Sigma's head was clearly spinning still and he had to constantly scrunch his eyes and face up in order to hold his concentration and not lose himself to the mess inside of his head.
"I...I saw you...that was you in the....the man in the tube..." Porter had never spoken to anyone about the dreams he used to have when he was younger, of a shadowy figure floating in the air, bathed in light, suspended in the liquid contained within a vat. It had haunted him for years before disappearing when he entered into the academy. It was a memory then? Of this...person? "What happened to you Leif?"
"Maybe I can help there," Dr. Roth cut in, turning away from the computers. "Sigma there, or Leif, was administered into the Enigma Soldier Project in order to pay off his debts to society. It was either that or life imprisonment...or exile into the Cult of Enia." There was another gasp behind Porter and everyone turned to look at Riya. When they had left her father at Omnicorp he had implored her to seek out the Enigma Project, and had been trying to kill her in order to send her body to them.
Riya's slim frame shook a little with the thought and she clutched Nami, the two holding each other for a moment in comfort. "You bastard!" Chase shouted, shocking everyone. "What the hell is this Enigma project? What are you doing to people?"
The doctor reached up to his face and peeled off the goggles, revealing a very haggard set of grey eyes that had not seen a proper sleep in years. He leaned back against one of the panels and looked up at the ceiling of the cave, staring at it for a while and not answering the question. Finally he took in a breath and opened his mouth.
"At first, we were making science." Roth reached up and rubbed his sore eyelids, pausing some more. Chase clenched his fists tightly and held himself back. Porter had no idea what had happened to Riya had affected the hotshot so much. "Science always has such great hope attached to it. Look at Goliaths, look at what they did to war, what that technology could have been used for instead. And now look at Sigma. Sigma is lost hope now. That's all he represents."
"Stop being philosophical and get to the point!" Chase barked.
"The goal of the Enigma project was to try and revive and perfect the bio-engineering techniques of the Jahari." This time when Roth stopped there was no anger, no impatience. Everybody knew who the Jahari were and had done. Weeks were devoted in history classes for teaching children all about the blighted race that had once ruled the Earth, the people who had called themselves the Jahari. They had believed a fusion of technology and man was possible, that genetic manipulation and biological machinery was the only way to go and they set about experimenting on each other, making horrific weapons and killing thousands of their own and anyone else they could get their hands on. It took the union of every other country on the planet at the time to stop their madness and banish the remains of their culture. It was always believed they had fled underground and had died out over time, turning into a legend instead of fact and becoming mythological beings, supernatural deities that would snatch you from your bed at night, whose hellish experiments should never be conducted again. For anyone to try was pure insanity.
"Before you judge us," Dr. Roth proceeded, "know that we did succeed, unfortunately. Sigma is living proof of our accomplishments, as is Syn, and soon Alpha as well. At first, the idea was simple: to build a weapon to end all wars. I had been drawn in when they offered me my daughter and..." The doctor stopped and turned his head to stare at a large cylinder at the corner of the cavern. The light was off under it but Porter could make out the faint outline of a person inside. Roth wiped his eyes a bit and cleared his throat so he could go on.
"Of course I accepted. As a leading scientist on the study of brain wave functions, they needed me to control the transfer of memories, the brain stabilization, and much more, and I needed them in order to try and give my daughter a second chance at life. We were supposed to take everything we had learned in building Goliaths and try to essentially compact that into a human body and generate a perfect weapon but..." Roth scratched at his robotic legs as if they were real; a phantom sensation of some sort. "I didn't realize the weapon to end all wars would be the weapon to enslave all others. Peace through submission is not peace at all because there will always be unrest and rebellion. The only way to escape such a monopoly of power is with more war. And even if you do achieve peace, where does the weapon go? What happens to it after the battle is over? Where do all the Goliaths and the guns and the bombs disappear to? Who gets them? I thought to myself that Sigma and Syn and Alpha were never going to go away once they were born, that they would be our race's burden to bear forever more and so I stole away Alpha in the hopes of reprogramming her and at least saving a portion of the world from the Enigma project."
There was silence in the space. Chase relaxed his tense fists. Riya pulled herself away from Nami and composed herself once more. Raul slowly sat down next to Ochenkov, joining him in a half-meditation. Nobody wanted to argue with the doctor. They were all pilots in warmachines. They were all part of a grand complex that existed on war and nothing else, and in the end they too would try to create peace through subjugation of their enemies. Could any one of them say they were better than the creator of Sigma or Syn? Maybe they hadn't crossed the ethical boundaries of tampering with people but the end goal was the same.
"Why Leif?" Porter whispered to Roth, taking his hand down and holding the tears he felt in his eyes. "Why did he get chosen out of all the other ones?"
"You had to commit very serious crimes against the Enian Federation in one way or another in order to qualify for the Enigma Soldier initiative, unless you willingly submitted yourself to it. Many other criminals were tested upon before the three who made it through, it could have just been chance that they came to Leif finally. But we were given the consent of your father Porter, before the more intense operations began. He didn't have much choice but to allow it. Anything is better than a life in prison or exile, trust me."
"Why Leif?" Porter mumbled again, his face turned down to his shoes, tears rolling down to the tip of his nose before splattering on the ground, just like some of the stalactites on the cave ceiling. His whole body was shaking with the emergence of his repressed feelings about his family. "Why Leif?" he repeated. "What did you do to them? What did you do to put you in there? Why Leif? Why couldn't you just come home to...to live with me?"
Sigma slowly blinked, robotically and emotionally processing the question at the same time, searching for the answer through every inch of data in his head. "I don't...I don't know Porter. I don't know what I did."
Porter grabbed Sigma's arms and tried to shake him, but the android stood firm, eventually letting Porter bang his fists against Sigma's chest and weep. "You should've just come home Leif. With dad and I. We could all be living together back home. Why would you do that?"
"Because I loved her." Sigma looked just as surprised as everyone else at his sudden response, and he brought his hand up to his mouth gingerly in shock. Something had bubbled up from the depths of his memory, come up to the surface, and popped, releasing itself in that statement.
"Perhaps I can help you then." Doctor Roth hobbled over to the vat where Alpha was suspended and flicked on the lights. "He refers to Allyson here, my daughter." Nami and Riya immediately dashed over to look at the cyborg floating in the liquid, with Ardwen joining them a little ways after. Chase remained, watching Sigma with suspicion as Porter was sliding down the android's chest. Raul stayed seated with Ochenkov, the two forming some unspoken bond in their meditations.
"This is your...your daughter?" Nami gulped, trying to understand what could possess a man to inflict such experimentation on his own flesh and blood.
"Do not underestimate what people will do when they have desire in their heart," Riya stated with such a conviction that it made Nami shudder. Riya was always soft-spoken. For her to be so harsh...
"I understand what I did was terrible and I will never repent enough for it, not even with the aid of Lord Ishiyama. Let us not forget our sins, for it is they that drive us forward so that we may erase them with our actions. Do not seek to erase them, but embrace them to become a part of you. We all sin. Let us help one another to prevent the sin of the future instead of trying to forgive the sin of the past."
"The book of Enia, the ninth passage, verse one," Sigma blurted out, unable to keep himself from recognizing the reference.
"Exactly Sigma, thank you." Doctor Roth nodded graciously at his robotic companion. "Allyson here, or Alpha as she is now known, was once Leif's lover, and also the leader of the Red Scarf Gang. She contributed to one of the largest riots in the Federation's history with the Red Scarf Rebellion. She tried to usurp the entire political structure of the country, dismantling it with words and activism and violence at one point. She was captured though, and held as a prisoner for her treason. She was a candidate for the Enigma project of course, due to the heinous nature of her crime, and so I saw it as a way for her to come back to me, to live again."
"Where does Sigma come in though?" Ardwen asked, pressing his face close to the glass to examine the machinery surrounding the android inside.
"He..." Roth stopped and looked over at the purple cyborg, his armour glossed with Porter's tears. Sigma had finally decided to pick the teen up and straighten him out. "Not even Sigma knows why he was put in jail or what he did. I have not told him and he has no records of it; they were all erased."
Leif, always listening to every sound, snapped his focus to the withered man. Porter gave out a final heave and tossed himself against his brother once more, this time not in anger or sadness, but in joy and relief. His brother was alive, on some level or another, and he had finally found him. Porter wasn't alone in this world anymore. There was somebody he could stand beside and lean upon. Porter embraced the cold metallic body of his lost sibling and Sigma, caught off guard by the gesture, found his own arms wrapping around his brother in response.
"I am glad you found your brother again Leif, and your love," Roth said softly. "You spoke of them both when I first met you. You would do anything to see them one more time, even though you hadn't even met your brother. I could never understand why you, such a loving, young man would be given such a harsh sentence. And so one day, I went into your file and found out just what it was that you did..."
A/N: Finally together again, Porter and Leif hug for the first time in their life. Time to find out just what exactly was the horrible crime Leif committed in the first place...