Kick it
-
Things rarely work out as planned.
"This way, this way! Don't let the fucker escape!"
Things being the present, the past, but never the future.
Gunfire. The sweet scent of death.
Sweating. Panting.
It's never what it seems.
Brass bounce against the walls, roll all over the floor. Concrete and metal, joined at last in one, fatal, caress.
"I escaped once, and I'll escape again! You won't ever get me!"
Contingency plan.
Etched way back in the mind. The cross was reached years ago, yet there never was a reason to resort to the final path. Run.
Move.
Boots pound the metal. Guns are leveled, but not fired.
"Don't shoot in here, idiots!"
It doesn't end.
"I don't want to be blown to fuck, so get out your knives and hunt him down!"
Taunting. Drops of sweat.
Shouts.
"You're all dead! You're all so very dead!"
Catwalk's reached, but left far behind in a matter of moments. Short legs aren't as fast as long legs.
"Stand still so we can kill you!"
Something sharp and heavy impacts with a wall.
A yelp, then it continues.
"You've no idea what you're getting into, sergeant!"
Flesh taps plastic. Levers are pulled. Codes are inputted. A soft humming.
Only now do I see things clearly.
-
Daedalus.
It's an old protocol, fashioned several decades ago. Its purpose; protection, elimination, espionage, infiltration. Parts of the original were maintained, primarily to serve as a warning.
Power is drawn from a total of eight plasma cells, and an auxiliary hydrogen fuel-cell. It has no built-in ranged weaponry, no obvious tricks, or even camouflage, but it's still the very finest of its kind.
The organic skeleton was ripped out, in favor of something more durable. Titanium beams mimic bones, but only one organ was deemed necessary for it to function; the brain, complete with the spinal cord, and safely locked within a new cranium of unbending metal. Everything was wired to it - limbs, sensors, armor control.
Heavily armored, all the better to serve its masters.
A special type of armor was developed, one that's equally resistant to all known kinds of abuse.
Chest, groin, thighs, shins, top of the forearms, and the upper arms are all covered in half an inch of self-repairing plastic, with a layer of super-secret armor sandwiched between it and yet more plastic.
Completely secured within are a number of support systems, such as mono-molecular forearm blades, a bio-scanner, advanced motion-detecting implants, experimental fibre-bundle musculature, and memory grafts to allow seamless interaction with all, at the time of development, currently used weapons, vehicles, and equipment.
It's fast enough to outpace and outlast all living creatures, and physically strong enough to battle targets significantly larger than itself without contracting too much damage.
Should things take a turn for the worse, a fail-safe device was installed, which allows it to detonate its power-unit. The resultant explosion is likely to vaporize both it and anything else within two-hundred meters.
Fast. Deadly. Survivable. Determined.
Yet, despite all efforts, it wasn't possible to fully wipe its memory, or even erase its personality.
It was dubbed First, code-named Daedalus, and sealed far away from prying eyes, until the day came when it was needed.
That day has come, at last.
-
Dizzy.
Faint.
Stumble my way out of something cold, face struck hard by another something that I only vaguely remember.
"Go! Go!" someone shouts to my left, but I have no idea what it wants me to do.
Nothing seems to work. Everything's out of place.
A loud sigh, then I fall forward.
I can't remember anything.
"Get up, bitch!" it calls to me, like I'm supposed to know what it wants. Like I'm supposed to obey. Like I'm supposed to do something.
Barely catch myself with my left hand, face on a collision course with the floor. Stopped, braced. In control.
I'm crouched, somehow, and still unsure of what to do.
Sight returns, and I see the creature for the first time.
It's a little man - a little, old, almost bald, man. A dim memory accompanies him.
Catch a glimpse of metal and plastic in the corner of my right eye. Someone larger, more threatening, than the little man has made itself known.
Digits, blue lines. Trajectories. Ethereal, and if I concentrate, they vanish.
Its knife is held high, but it moves slowly.
"Bitch!" he's not exactly patient, and he's also decided to huddle beneath a massive control console. Wild eyes search me out, try to convince me to do things his way. "Kill him!"
Kill.
My head twists in the armored creature's direction. Kill is an ugly word, a nasty word. It should not be.
But it seems so familiar.
The helmet it wears conceals its identity, but the cry it emits tells me it's a male human, approximately thirty years old.
And so it begins.
I rise to my full height, and in the same motion that my back stretches, I also move towards him, right arm extended away from my torso like a flagpole.
We meet after a few seconds. His head hits my forearm, knocks him off balance.
It's not enough, of course, but I'm still not used to any of this.
Take a step backwards, then I thrust my right arm into his unarmored stomach. He wraps around my hand, and the thought and feel of everything makes me queasy, but I see no reason to stop.
My left hand comes alive, crawls up to his throat. Fingers spread, snake their way in beneath the collar of his armor. Notice that he's got something that I don't, but I can't place it.
Three more appear from behind him. Maybe they've been there for awhile - I don't know.
There's a crunch, and I think I broke his neck. I didn't mean to. I don't know. I don't know anything.
"Finish them!" the little man commands. I don't want to do this, but I do. What.
The corpse drops, and I make my way over to the other three, slowly. My legs refuse to obey me, or maybe it's I who refuse to obey them.
Past orders are disregarded, and the leader, a young, female fox, face covered in beautiful gray fur, opens fire on me. Her rifle spews death, but I don't feel what I should be feeling.
Bumps, a few sharp impacts, but little else.
Dizziness overtakes me, and my head tilts dangerously to the left. Left. Always the left.
I lose control over it, forced to watch them with my right eye only.
More soon join her. Beams of red lick the darkness. Flesh would be carved by it, but I remain standing. Same when a revolver unloads large-caliber rounds into my face. Scraped. Feels like something's been stretched out of proportions.
Arrival.
Sharp stuff pops out of my arms, and a clumsy swing from my right hand splits open the fox's throat. Things happen, bad things.
I'm not sure what, exactly.
It's all black and red, and the stench is awful, same with the temperature.
-
"You can't win."
"Educate me."
"I'll always remain. I'll always watch you, pretend to protect you. Keep you closer than your closest friend."
"Indeed. Your words assure me. I have the most fitting plan in store for you - why, one might even think that it was made especially for you."
"Enjoy your victory while you can. I'll come for you in the end, even if I have to defy both life and death to get you."
"You don't have to worry about those things, young one. Rest. Sleep."
"Not even hell can protect you from me."
"Welcome the fire."
-
My eyes snap open, and it's the worst joke ever made. They're locked on my hands, my gore-dripping hands. The remains of four people, decked out in standard combat armor, line the walls and floor all around me.
On second thought, these aren't my hands - my hands aren't made of plastic, nor are they white, It looks like skin, but it can't be, because I don't feel anything.
"Thank Jesus for forgotten doomsday-devices," a very, very familiar voice mutters from behind. It's so familiar that I don't even need to turn to know who it is. "Get their shit, so we can move, my new partner in crime." A voice from ages past. Someone who should have been dead by now. Unfortunately, it seems like I saved him.
Why?
That question has a very complicated answer, and I won't even bother searching for it until I've figured out where I am, who I am, and what's happened to me. Every moment hurts.
"Snively," another, even more familiar, voice whispers. It belongs to me. "Oh, poor Snively." Sheer force of will brings my gaze away from my mutilated and stained hands, and makes damn sure that they're both folded neatly across my chest, which, for some reason, neither looks nor feels like the chest I used to know. A moment of silence, for us both.
He shuffles for a second, but that's it.
It's my turn, and I kick it off by spinning on the spot. Hair, that's much longer than I remember, swings like a whip. It reaches well past my ass, and it, too, feels unfamiliar, like it doesn't belong.
And there he is, just barely crawled out from beneath the confines of a massive control console. Remember.
I remember him.
His name's Colin, but we've always called him Snively. Because of his dumb voice and idiotic way of doings things. Always sneaky, always backstabbing - never to be trusted, ever.
"Give me one reason why I shouldn't kill you right now," I wheeze the words, "Snively."
He looks a lot older than I remember, and thinner.
"Because," it takes him a little while to get up on his feet, at which point he dusts himself off, adjusts his green tie, then gives me a mean smirk, "I know the answer to every question in your mind, and I'm also your only link to the outside world."
His words make me curl my hands into fists.
"You," I stutter. Speech turns to grumbles and barely-audible curses. Is he right? Is he wrong? What do I believe at this point? He couldn't harm me the last time we spoke, and I have no reason to believe that he's grown stronger over the years. "I'll let you live, for now."
A single nod, and the devil's own smirk.
"Good," his right hand motions in the direction of the corpses. "Now, load up. We've still got to break out of this hell-hole."
-
VT2 - 2006
