Author's Note: All random, weird ideas below are mine, with the exception of:
Stardroids, Mavericks, and Mercury, © 2002 Capcom Co. of Japan, Ltd.
"Quarantined", lyrics © 2002 At the Drive-In
For a full list of every single song that went into the creation of this acid-trip through Mercury's neurons, e-mail xianszkhaas@yahoo.com.
And please, be considerate readers: Read, and review!
All dates are in the European dating system. (day.month.year)


A Virus Conspires

autonomous machete for hands

06.01.45
I pray to God that you, whoever you are, who finds and reads this isn't offput by what I've got to say. Forgive me my vain repetitions and my lapses in memory; I'm writing this to remind myself of what I've lost and Hermes can only give me so much time to work in between those damnable lapses into the Virus.
I had best start with my history; I can tell, from the way the Virus has begun working on me, that the older the memory the sooner it will be overwritten until I am bent and broken to the will and glory of Lord Sigma.
Whatever happens, I pray that this will be enough for me to remember I am not some twisted creation of his. I am no mere killing machine to be pointed in one direction and set loose to kill what he would have me destroy; I am better than that, and let me only live through this and regain my freedom and I will prove it through his destruction.

warden and judge hide behind masks

I take the only name you'd know me by from this world: Mercury, the central-most world of your tiny solar system. Also the name of one of your forgotten gods, the Herald, the Swift One, unerring in his message and rarely seen unless he needed to be. Sigma, naturally, would make a little pun of the name, thinking by stripping me of the rank of Herald and reducing my name to Quicksilver--mere metal, instead of the Fleet One--he would reduce me to something base like all his Mavericks.
I digress; best I save recent history for later, when those memories begin to degrade. It would almost be a relief from the shame to have them gone.
First: You of your so-named Earth know me as a Stardroid, one of the creatures who sat in Judgment of your world mere decades ago. That we had returned was an anomaly, and a frightening one to a war-torn populace like yours.
But I aver that I was something, someone before that and that it would be folly to judge me simply based on what I was later called to do.
I was, before being called to join the Nine, a medic. It is a position and a set of oaths that I have struggled even latterly to maintain--one that has made me indispensable, at least of late, to the Nine. My true-name, the one I had before becoming a Stardroid, was Kaykaran Qol-Tan--my surname from my father's brood and my first name meaning 'he weeps' from the tearlike marks on my face. God only knows it became infinitely more appropriate after my death.
I did die; only Jupiter to my knowledge was so fortunate as not to taste Death's bitter cup before being one of our number. Memory declares I committed a suicide of grief, alone and friendless after witnessing the deaths of all I'd ever loved. It was, as I recall, my fault--for not accepting the damnable right of forfeiture I had forced on others by strength of will or sweetness of voice. Had I but done what I requested of all my medics and forfeited my sense of touch, I could have healed those who died for my own peculiar selfishness.
All this, of course, is not what I imagine you would be looking for. My struggles are nothing to you; who or what I was before becoming the judgmental monster so many decry me as is immaterial. That I exist now is an anomaly noticed only be a few concerned persons, curious as to the identity of the new Maverick who so resembles the creature in the history books known as the Herald in those days of terror nearly fifty years ago. I yield to head over heart and subject you to no more of my self-pity--go, seek, and ye shall find, ye curious, every nuance of my history laid out to your prying eyes. Not here, naturally--to do so would be foolish, and I best preserve my chances of being remembered if you, the faceless they, have many documents seeded among the machinations of the Mavericks to search for, instead of the sole hope of a dying man.
I go now; Sigma calls, and no longer may I exercise my last scraps of agency. Hermes can only hide these indiscretions for so long.


Contents of this document are © 2002 Kim Kondratieff.