Disclaimer: I own no part of Gundam Wing or its characters and wrote this story exclusively for the enjoyment of fans. I do not intend to profit from it in any way.
Note: This is one of many scenarios that attempts to explain the somewhat foggy past of our main man, Heero Yuy. I hope you enjoy it.
By ZERØ's Wings
Two intense, blue eyes opened slowly. A young boy, perhaps no more than 14, stared perplexed at the swirling world of green around him.
He was part of the newest line of genetically altered humans known as the 'Hero Youth' models. Suspended by a transparent, plastic umbilicus, he was submerged in a potion of alcohol, formaldehyde, and biological hybrid cells. The boy had awoken in a holding tank at the Alliance Labs on colony Lx-12110502.
This boy had been born naturally, by mothers living on this and other backwater colonies, but he had been unconscious for ten years, while his body underwent massive physical disruption and augmentation by state-of-the-art artificial bacterium called nanites.
This lab contained eighteen youths that were unwittingly placed into the Hero projects. Of those only one had already regained consciousness from his long slumber. But he was different from the start.
This lab was one of the last of its kind, as the Hero Youth models were found to be mentally unstable and difficult to control. The military applications of the physically advanced Hero Models had all been massive failures and funding from the Alliance had dried up completely. The project was easily one of the most expensive and time-consuming blunders in the After Colony years, but the project had been kept secret to the public and most of the military. The few Alliance bureaucrats who authorized it could easily push it under the carpet with the dust mites.
The lab was busy today, as scientists and technicians were making the final adjustments to each hero youth models cerebellum. It had been found that they took twice as long to adjust to zero gravity in comparison with the average colony citizen. This was a minor problem at this stage in the game, however.
Skinny, clean-suit enveloped lab engineers hurried busily to each of the consoles, checking the vital signs of each model. The two head techs, Compter and Emulat, were grinning proudly as they surveyed their work. These models had no physical deformities and all of their brain wave patterns were normal. The irradiation of their major brain lobes was complete, and now the young men were constantly being fed combat data. Of course, with no sensory output or higher brain functions, their hungry little minds lapped up the information like buttermilk.
In the heavily plated tank in the corner was the project's wild card: A skinny, brown-haired youth of no particular nationality. He was completely unique, despite his unremarkable features. This one had his higher brain functions intact and although the centers of his brain for feeling and emotional responses were dormant, they still had the possibility of being awoken under the right circumstances.
In effect, this model was more human than the others were, but he was still being fed huge doses of military tactics. Although he could grasp the emotions of other people and perhaps eventually become a part of normal society, he would still be the soulless killing machine that the Alliance military desired. The lab technicians had nicknamed him 'Crying Boy' for his capacity to react emotionally.
Crying Boy was at first indifferent to the men in odd, balloon-like suits that rushed around him. He was about to speak to them; ask them the thousands of questions that had been welling up since his strange rebirth in this green fluid. Just as his lips parted the tiniest bit, he heard a huge, blaring red noise. It was like an axe, a sound splitting his head right down the middle. The command was impossible to ignore. It segmented his brain into rigid sections that contained the basic layout of a combat mission.
As the young man adjusted to this new receptacle of thought, he found that his current mission objectives were unclear. This was disturbing, no, downright terrifying, to him. One thing was certainly clear, though. These odd men walking around him were not essential to his mission, and were therefore enemies.
Crying Boy had already mastered the ability to control his own pulse and brain waves. To the busy scientists, his condition seemed to be unchanged. He waited for the crowd to thin somewhat; he was instructed that this mission called for an advantage on a tactical level only; any strategic confrontation was to be avoided until the arrival of additional forces.
Crying Boy waited for about an hour, controlling the movement of every skin pore and hair follicle, and finally his patience paid off. All of the techs had taken off their sterile suits and left the lab, for coffee and talk about the newest mobile suit technology. This was a side job for many, almost all of the techs who worked on these models were hoping to be bumped up the ladder to work on the MS division of Romafellar. Head technicians Compter and Emulat were the only ones left in the room, and both had opened the hoods of their clean suits to share a pack of cigarettes.
"Why are we making these 'Hero Youth' models, Compter? I still don't get what the alliance wants with a bunch of starry-eyed teenagers acting as soldiers."
"The enlistment age was dropped really low in the past couple of years, and the Alliance thinks that there will be less suspicion around some teenage punk crawling out of the woodwork and joining the army. The earlier models were all full-grown men. Sure, they were easier to re-incubate and strengthen, but these guys have been missing in action for decades. I can see how the public wouldn't just swallow the whole idea of men reappearing thirty years later with no memories.
As soon as Compter finished his lecture, the lights on crying boys console flashed red and alarms began to sound.
"Oh god!" Compter cried.
"What is it?"
"Model 18 is awake," Compter said; he was already accessing crying boy's life support functions.
"What the hell are you doing?" screamed Emulat.
"I'm terminating the organism. You may want to stand away from that tank, Emulat. When that thing wakes up it's gonna kill us all!"
"It won't hurt us, it has its military recognition protocol," Emulat said calmly, unwavering.
"You idiot! That's Crying Boy! He doesn't have the data implants, only the mental conditioning. He's going to consider us enemies!" Emulat was starting to loose it now, too. The cool exterior melted away like an instant, and all that was left was a squeaking, helpless fool.
"Compter, you have to shut it down. You have to kill it."
"What do you think I've been trying to do?" Compter growled angrily. The console was uncooperative, and kept locking up and repeating the evacuation and quarantine warnings. In the intensity of the moment, Emulat and Compter never heard the delicate sound of duraglass cracking, or the sound of green solution dribbling onto the floor.
Crying Boy saw the two men rushing frantically to shut off the tank's life support. Little did they know, crying boy had already severed his plastic umbilical cord and was pummeling the glass of the tank with his hands and feet.
At last his wet fist punched right through the side of the tank. The jagged glass cut long, deep gashes in the boy's arm. He felt no pain or displeasure, only a mild sensation to denote injury.
Minor blood loss. No major veins or arteries punctured. Combat effectiveness decreased by five percent. Crying Boy burst through the side of the tank and landed on the cold tile floor, naked and dripping with the green liquid. The two enemies in front of him made shrill little cries and then he advanced.
The young man couldn't believe the slow, uncoordinated reaction times of these targets. He descended upon the first target at a crawling pace, and still overtook the man with ease. He punched the scientist in the gut and found that his hand had no difficulty going straight through the man's flesh.
Who were these weaklings? He thought incredulously. His fist tore right through the technician's chest like a hot knife. The young man let his fist swim around in Compter's chest cavity for a little while, then found purchase around a throbbing object inside the tech's ribcage. It fit perfectly into the palm of his hand, so he extracted it out of curiosity. A blood-soaked cigarette tumbled from Compter's lips and hit the tile floor. Crying Boy looked at the prize in his blood-soaked hand. He dropped the lab technician's warm, slippery heart onto the floor with a bored look. It had just stopped beating as a final aortic vein snapped free.
Crying Boy found such energy and speed welling up inside him that it seemed to be a crime not to use it, even on pathetic creatures such as these. He rushed across the lab's tiled floor with agility and grace. When he was halfway to his second target, Emulat, he spun his body around and gripped Emulat's head and neck in his muscular arms. Emulat's neck snapped like a twig. It seemed to somehow stain his hands as they were put to such trifling work.
A few moments later, Crying Boy had dressed himself in Emulat's lab coat and jeans and was pinning the man's blood-spattered ID card to his white undershirt. He didn't bother with the buttons; Compter's side arm had already attracted his attention. It was a crude tool, a semi-automatic snub pistol, but his hands wrapped comfortably around the handle, so he kept it.
As Crying Boy exited the lab, a red, electronic eye swiveled around in its wall slot to greet the renegade experiment. Crying Boy reached out and grabbed the eye in his fist, but it gave off a huge amount of heat and he thought he detected a slight charring of his flesh. A minor electrical burn, he thought, and then decided to ignore the assessment of it.
Crying Boy's next stop was the control room. He saw the hanger bay doors at the end of the hall and figured there would be some kind of escape vehicle inside, perhaps a small shuttle. However, to get outside the complex, he would need to open the runway gates, which could be operated from the control room's security computer.
He only encountered one other target on his way to the control room. This one had a uniform, and his ID proclaimed he was a security guard. This person had a reaction time slightly faster than the scientist did, but he was still a comically slow and clumsy slug to Crying Boy. The guard's hand reached down toward a gun, snug in its holster by the guard's waist. Crying Boy aimed his own pistol and fired with a sense of mundane detachment. He let his fingers do the work alone; the rush of adrenaline hollowed out his mind. He put a round clear through the guard's left eye.
Crying Boy let the control room doors slide open with his gun ready. He killed four more guards inside and disarmed the fifth with a shot to the kneecap. His bullets ricocheted off walls and blasted apart equipment. Monitor screens exploded into bright sparks and pieces of glass.
Crying Boy found the one computer that he hadn't put a slug through and used it to open all the exterior gates. Alarms gave their vociferous, wailing calls in the background.
Within moments, he had already evaded or killed the last of the inner security and made a blind dash for the hangar bay. Unfortunately, an entire platoon of trained soldiers, twice as fast as the sluggish guards and scientists, was waiting for Crying Boy when he entered the huge hangar.
Crying Boy ignored the savage, barking reports that exploded through the large room and his eardrums. He ran on, regardless of the yellow-white sunbursts of muzzle flare that blinded him.
At some point, he was no longer aware that he was running. The world had blurred and swirled into a kaleidoscope of unrecognizable images. In this confusion, even Crying Boy's relentlessly commanding military brain was silenced. He was just a confused boy in the middle of a firefight.
When his military brain returned, the world became shaper, clearer, and bursting with a thousand information-loaded perspectives. It was bewildering at first, but Crying Boy adjusted quickly.
Now the young man could not only see the spaces between bullets, but also the bullets themselves, screaming through in midair like hawks of solid mercury.
He took one in the shoulder, but spun blazingly fast, with arms and legs twisted together, meshing together as one, and he could see the other blurry comet tails pass him by. The air behind the bullets was distorted and wavy, like the air above a licking flametongue or the blacktop of a hot, summer road.
Crying Boy made it to the nearest available transport, a large shuttle designed for atmospheric flight. He jumped inside the cockpit and disposed of the waiting co-pilot.
Crying Boy watched the huge, mechanical docking arms drag the shuttle down the indoor section of the runway. As soon as the bulky, metal limbs let go, he punched the accelerator and slammed the dual throttles forward. The shuttle hesitated, then lunged forward, gobbling up the runway and lifting its massive girth into the air.
Crying Boy waited until the shuttle had passed far beyond the perimeter fence of the labs; then shut the world away and fell asleep instantly.
End Part 1