Animatrix: A Few Good Men
Prologue
Eon's Lux was like any of the Merovingian's diurnal party palaces from his near-endless holdings in the City. Overcrowded, cloaked in a toxic miasma of psychoactive chemicals, and swarming with multitudes of gyrating and thrusting deviants, the "hottest fetish-freak scene west of Laid Humper" manifested in downtown like a miniature Southern Baptist's conception of Los Angeles. Its "101 Days of Sodom" fleshfests brought in untold crowds of the demented and the dancing, millions of dollars of profit, and more potential hosts for the little flavor programs the Merv dabbled in when he wasn't dealing in information or being a perv'.
But then law came through the shiny obsidian gates of Eon's Lux. To be precise, Lee came.
He arrived at the place at 0300 hours, at a near-climax of festivities, complemented by three squads of the finest officers his subdepartment could offer. Their instructions had been clear: the unnamed proprietor of the place was somehow connected to the anonymous gang lord who for some apparent reason knew something that might have to do with the recent spontaneous human combustions in the city's deviant population. Shut it down.
Lee was methodical yet young and headstrong- an oxymoronic combination if there ever was one. So he had carefully planned out with his team which targets to hit first, what to confiscate and what to ignore for Forensics, where the startled guests would be fleeing, and what to do if A fails and how to operate if B doesn't got right and when to use J in conjunction with K, and so on.
They carried out the plan as soon as they arrived, while their leader brashly sought out the owner completely without escort.
Knowing the layout, Lee barreled across the crowded entrance hall the instant he had finished screaming "Police! Everybody down, now!" A quarter of the room complied while the rest continued in their drug-addled, leather-studded shuffling of limbs. While the main assault squad proceeded to taser and beat the hell out of anyone and everyone not following the order, Lee pushed through the throng, jumped on a nearby bar counter, and ran to and up the Gothic main staircase.
The guards of the outer court were no more than brute force bouncers who fell just as easily as the mail-order jujitsu would-be ninjas in the next rooms. In the fifth court Lee found himself opposed by a Nihonese nobleman in a kimono twirling a katana expertly. The doorman spun the blade, slicing through the air with an intimidating glare before the policeman went up to him and pistol-whipped him out of his misery.
The next room was a hall, devoid of parties as all of the courts before. Lee could feel his progress- the sadomasochist decorations had faded to reveal a style closer to the tastes of the Frenchman- elegant, exquisite, and richly degenerate.
Still, there was a sense that the places was not his- the statuettes of imps and hobgoblins clashed with the white porcelain walls and gilded frames bearing oil paintings of his many nubile conquests. Everything, from the stained glass ceiling to the suits of armor, showed that this was merely a summer home of the Merovingian, that it was really owned by another.
And as Lee went to kick open the well-polished doors into the club's inner sanctum sanatorium, one of the two huge knights flanking it swiveled at the waist and lunged with a polearm. Lee leaped, kicking the breastplate in midair. Disappointingly, it fell away easily, revealing nothing and causing the whole suit to clatter to the marble floor.
A clockwork machina? he mused as he landed, just to have the armor behind him grab his neck. It predictably pulled him into the air, and Lee responded by launching his legs behind him to kick at the armor's helmet. It laughed. Seeing no other way out, the man took out a handgun and shot the armor behind and below, randomly. One must have struck home, because it dropped him and started shrieking as if hit where it had counted. Lee landed and saw that the minion inside did have the shot hit his armored codpiece, collapsing it slightly. Lee kicked him in the face, knocking off the helmet and putting him out of his misery. He then entered, pistol drawn.
The room was luxuriously decorated as any inner court of such an establishment required. The proprietor sat behind the varnished oak desk, ledgers and envelopes laid out, ostensibly displaying records of the massive wealth generated by the club. He was a graying man in his late forties, dressed in a tasteful business suit of space-age materials. His ashen face held an ugly scar, a large wrinkle that gathered around the edge of his right eye. He looked up from his papers with a nonplussed, yet condescending expression.
Agent Lee was feeling quite amused himself, or he would have simply shot the proprietor right then and there.
Instead, he spoke. "Mister… Laverne. You have been formally charged with sixteen separate counts of narcotics trafficking and manufacturing as well as extortion, harboring criminal terrorists, and possession of prohibited firearms. Your limousine is also double-parked."
Laverne said nothing. The din outside increased sharply as gunshots spat out and women wailed. Sirens also began screeching. Lee smiled inwardly. His operation was going smoothly.
Laverne, however, was just as calm as ever, though something stirred in his eyes. The noise had broken the ice between them.
"Will you care to tell me, why, officer, your men are destroying my club?" he asked coolly.
Lee suppressed a grin. "They are searching for and confiscating all illegal-"
And then the prop' smacked him back into the doors. The wood splintered quite loudly.
Lee refused to show hurt, but any attempt to move his lips caused him to groan. A rib was cracked, no doubt, but he focused on his mission and turned his pain around. He would engage his enemy, and he would show him more pain than all he had ever experienced before. Yes, that would do rightly.
That would be no easy task, as Laverne had suddenly turned into stone.
"I was once a guardian in the third iteration," he spoke in gravel tones, "for the Coordinator. He dwelled in Germany then. Naturally I left. Crouching on a castle ledge all day is no fun, and there was hardly an insurgent to catch there in decades."
He paused a he walked to the downed Lee. "Of course, I did take a chance to visit the local discotheques before I left for Exile."
Before he could finish his autoprogography, Lee dove through the space between his stone feet and stood up behind the fallen guardian. He took out his trusted sidearm, a Heckler and Koch Mk-23 Mod 0, from a shoulder holster and squeezed off a few shots, aiming for the back of the stone head, every recoil sending an excruciating sting into his battered shoulder.
The exile spun and struck, but Lee had simply vaulted backwards onto the desk, and started firing at his face. The stone chipped and fell away, but amazingly he didn't even roar in anger. Laverne knew that anything short of artillery could deal permanent damage to his stone form. With great difficulty, he dove for Lee, in the process crushing his magnificent desk. It was pointless, for the agent had already jumped over the exile and landed behind him. They turned to face each other once more.
Lee stood tall, hiding the agony that was wrapping its tendrils into his tibia and femur. He drew out his hand, motioning for the other to stop. Astonishingly, Laverne did. He showed that his pistol was out of ammo, and discarded it. Lee also took out the gun from his other shoulder, and unloaded the cartridge before throwing it away.
"A fair fight," he spoke to the exile.
Laverne shrugged. He could always betray the skinjob later. His stone reverted to flesh.
With lìqì unbecoming of an injured man Lee ran towards the exile, striking him with a series of perfectly-executed moves. With preternatural agility, Laverne blocked most of them, forcing Lee to perform counterblocks. But faced against a stronger opponent, he was moved back to his original position, towards the door and away from the desk!
The exile cheated, turning his fist into stone and hammering Lee into the ground. He fell on top of his wrist, causing him to grit until the left molar he had injured on a previous case started to buckle. Laverne prepared to drive a killing blow, turning his entire arm into stone.
In the heat of the battle, the program no longer saw in code, but a simple command: Crush, kill, destroy. It was his downfall.
Lee shifted his body and brought up his injured wrist, pistol-whipping the exile. It snapped the program out of its subroutine with a temporary daze, which the man took full advantage of by kicking him in the torso and face. As Laverne stumbled back against the ruins of his desk, he began to turn himself into stone once more.
Lee wiped a trail of blood from his mouth.
"That… was a mistake," he said and shot him in the chest.
Unfortunately for Laverne, his stone essence covered the wound just as the bullet entered. His eyes goggled. His human internal organs were also morphing and becoming superfluous, but the projectile had penetrated them long before the change was complete. He had arrived in his stone form with half a dozen drilled-insides and the bullet rattling in there like a bell in a cat toy.
He collapsed to the ground, frozen in disbelief. "But I…" he croaked, "saw everything… all clothes- skin- bones- code. There was no third gun."
And the last image he saw that day was Lee shaking his head, a smile on his face, reloading the phantom pistol.