Fatal Exception Error: Chapter 6 Trial Summary
Now with the knowledge (or at least some of it) of where the enigmatic Pandora had been during her disappearance, the nine remaining students once again headed to a trial room, this one bigger and more grand than any of the others they’d been in, in order to find her killer.
Almost immediately, Fumiko questions CAL about why the cause of death was not listed for Pandora. He entertains the question for about .5 seconds before demanding them get to work in figuring out who’d done this. In that vein, the students, led in this by Yoshiro and Kaoru, decide that despite the incident directly after the murder, and the one before that, Hayate isn’t the culprit. This launches into a short discussion about Pandora, and Valu reveals that her whereabouts were the vents.
This segues into Shinobu asking about evidence, and Kaoru reveals that she knows what killed the paranormal investigator: a maintenance robot found in the cybernetics lab, with blood, bone, and brains on its drill. She also says that she believes someone took control of said robot in order to do that, and Shinobu points out that Shinsuke is a programmer, to which he responds in an obviously irritated way. Valu interjects, saying that while there is a chance it is him, there’s also a chance it’s not, and she wants to know what was up with the dead rabbit with its blood on Pandora’s shirt.
While Shinobu and Shinsuke bicker, Kaoru brings up that based on the note found in Pandora’s hand, at some point last night, the oxygen on the ship stopped working, and Fumiko adds that she knows why: there’s a weedkiller on board that kills people within 90 minutes but stays in the air for hours. Kaoru remembers that Yoshiro told her he passed out during the lockdown only to wake up in his room, with the speculation that Pandora must have taken him there. Again, due to the factor of the weed killer, suspicion turns to Shinsuke and again he snaps at the person who brings it up. CAL reveals that the maintenance robots’ shutdowns are hardcoded and for a brief moment suspicion lands on him. It doesn’t last, but Fumiko comes to a conclusion: whoever the administrator is is the one who is behind Pandora’s death.
In the middle of a discussion on where exactly Pandora had been killed, Yoshiro, who had been mostly quiet until now, brings something out, while CAL tells them that the robots’ tools shut down in the presence of humans. This only confuses the discussion more, before Yoshiro finally holds up a book as he declares there might have been another person. Or that the book was Pandora’s, and that’s what they finally decide on. Inside the book are each of the living kids’ names, and a short message for them:
Tucked into the journal is a sheet of paper with somewhat frantically scribbled words on it. They seem to address all the others
They’re brief, concise, and read as follows:
"Kimura - Perhaps you never hated me after all.
Haku - You showed kindness. If it wasn’t a trick, I am grateful.
Nalak - I appreciated the gifts. I will miss you.
Hayashi - You are a good person. Survive.
Tsujii - I am glad that somebody at least is still friends with Kimura.
Hamasaki - I apologize for the fight we had.
Uetsuji - You can keep her safe. You can keep them all safe.
Fujioka - They don’t hate you. None of them do.
Gacchiri-san - All is forgiven.”
After the note is passed around, the subject of conversation returns to the weedkiller, and the idea that whoever had set it off wanted to kill them all comes up. Kaoru suggests that the people who had sabotaged the space station had done it.
There’s more back and forth, and CAL interjects, laughing because they haven’t even found the cause of death yet, and that gives Kaoru an idea: if the robots couldn’t activate around living humans, and Pandora had been drilled by the robot, then the weedkiller must have been the cause of death.
In light of this new information, the blame is once more put on Shinsuke, and this time, he doesn’t handle it was well, still insisting that Hayate must be the one responsible. He falls into another coughing fit, this time coughing up a little blood before wiping it on his pants and continuing to deny everything. Then, Fumiko asks him if his organs are failing, to which he responds with angry confusion.
Yoshiro approaches him, trying to soothe the sick boy, but Shinsuke’s condition is only worsening, it seems. What Fumiko had said sparks something with Kaoru, and she pulls out a whole sheaf of notes, flipping through them until she comes upon something that she proceeds to read out loud:
"Known symptoms: fainting, coughing, sneezing in the initial phase. As the infection progressed, symptom development accelerates rapidly. End stage symptoms include liver, lung, heart, and kidney failure. The terminal stage can be reached in under a week. Attempted treatment and immunity research has yielded some results. Experimental treatments have had a 50% success chance in animal subjects. Although the disease cannot be cured, we have found at artificial statis can postpone all effects indefinitely. BREAKTHROUGH: heightened stress levels dramatically increase antibody creation rate in both infected and immunized test subjects."
CAL demands they get back to figuring out what and who had killed Pandora, but most of them are still focused on Shinsuke, who doubles over coughing… but underneath it, it almost sounds like laughing. Discussion continues, just for a brief moment, before Shinsuke’s laugh-coughing reaches a fever pitch, and with harsh gasps and wheezes between words and sentences, he jovially expresses disbelief about how he can’t believe they’d bought it. “Suckers.” He whispers as he falls to his knees. He does not move.
And then the lights go out.
At first, there’s nothing but the various babbling of the students. Then, the screen where Caligula had previously been lights back up.
The screen is completely blue apart from the white text that pops up.
ＥＲＲＯＲ： ＡＤＭＩＮ ＤＥ－ＳＹＮＣＥＤ．．．
ＬＯＡＤＩＮＧ．．． ｔｓｕｊｉｉｓｈｉｎｓｕｋｅ．ｅｘｅ．．．
Below that, the status bar is empty, but it rapidly fills, and once the bar reaches 100%, the screen dims again, and a sickeningly familiar sound starts up, laughter, now free of the coughing and hacking, that they thought had died with the software programmer. The laughter permeates the room, the halls, the entire space station, before the screen lights back up and the new admin smirks as he glares out and down to the remaining kids, still laughing. At them, of course.
"I got you assholes good, didn’t I? Of fuckin’ course I did! I’m that damn good! God, you fucking morons! Who else could it have been? Of course Gacchiri was a frame, the bullet didn’t even match his gun! Only someone as skilled as myself could’ve pulled this off, and as a matter of fact, I did! And you fuckers bought all of it, ate it up like the stupid animals you are! Oh, Tsujii-kun couldn’t have done it, he’s too inept, he’s too nice! Fuckin’ fool ALL OF YOU MEAT SACKS!"
As the remaining living students express various degrees of shock, anger, fear, and sadness, Shinsuke reveals that he had killed Pandora, partially because she had absconded into the vents and released a bunch of information to them by way of unlocking doors and breaking things, partially because fuck her. The weedkiller was indeed the cause of death, and he had framed Hayate, in addition to starting the mutual killing and taking over George in the first place. The AI, he continues, was wrought by way of the HAD-35 system, where he uploaded a copy of himself, similar but different to the ones the rest of the dead kids had, and made it admin.
At one point, Valu vaguely threatens him, and he obviously responds by lowering a gun, maybe even the same one that killed Yuki, from the ceiling and aiming directly at her. The threats subside soon afterward.
After many shouted questions and demands for answers, Shinsuke tells them he’s not going to kill them (yet, at least), that question time is over, and they should skedaddle (and maybe read up on some of the files Pandora had given her life for) in the meantime.
The trial room doors open again and Shinsuke disappears off the screen, leaving the students to slowly trickle out in groups of two and one, leaving them to decide what to do next.
