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Title: MEDIC+
Rating: M for Mature. Due to violence, gore, language, and adult situations.
Original Idea: TripMineMedic [http : // www. youtube. com/ user/ TripMineMedic ]
Story By: Shijin-Sama / VtheEndV
Summary: ANIMuS. The Animated Natural Immersion Simulator. Intended to be Aperture Science's next greatest project has gone rouge. Even the worlds greatest AI GLaDOS has succumbed. Sealed off from the outside world there is no hope for escape, no hope for help, no hope to survive. Only one man stands between it and victory, Gavin Jordan. Codename: Medic.
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The room is cold, so very cold. It always had been, even when it was filled with people. Gavin shivered and shuffled a hand through the papers at his side nervously. He had worked the calculations over so many times in his head. So many times he though his fingers might fall off or he might collapse from exhaustion. Every time, every single goddamn time it was the same. It wasn't viable, no chance at survival. At best he'd be stuck the same as the rest of those poor lost souls. At the worst, well death would seem like a godsend after ANIMuS got hold of him.
Reaching up he massaged his temples, eyes closed, forehead creased in pain. He wasn't a young man, hell he was thirty, and this kind of crap had happened to him of all people. Scrubbing his hands across his eyes he leaned back up, dark brown eyes skittering over the gunmetal gray walls of the facility. The screen in font of him glowed dully, shedding it sepia tones over his face. He looked older than he was hell, he felt older than he was. In times past he might have craved for something like this to happen. Now he just wished he could go to sleep and never wake up.
There was a whisper of sound behind him, and his eyes lurched to the side. White flashed in the corner of his eyes.
Marina he thought dejectedly.
Swiveling his chair around he stared up at her. She wasn't what some people would call beautiful. She was too old and too stern for that descriptor. But she was striking. With hair and eyes as dark as crow wings, pink lips pulled into a stern frown. She was a nice woman, as far as he knew. After all they had never really been friends, before. He had always been closer to the others. Now though, now he had no one else. Only they were in here, sealed off from the outside world. Just two lonely souls, stuck in the closest thing to purgatory he had ever felt.
"It's a stupid idea," She burst out, clutching a clipboard to her chest with a grip so tight Gavin was sure he could have counted the veins in her hands if he had felt the need, "Your going to get everyone killed!" Her face was controlled, calm, cool, but her hands and her voice betrayed her.
His face darkened, and grabbing a hand full of the papers at his side he stood. At his full height he was not much taller than her, but his rage lent him power and he loomed over her. He shoved the sheaf of papers into her cold, hands. Uncaring as some of them drifted to the floor. It didn't matter. Each one of them said the same thing.
The computer he was forced to use might never have as much power as GLaDOS, but he didn't have a choice in the matter. Even the slightly insane AI had disappeared, sucked into the power of the rouge computer. Into something that was supposed to be, a simple GAME. Something that was supposed to be a perfectly safe simulation they could create and then farm to the filthy rich outside the walls of the laboratory. He cursed himself for not thinking, for not minding what happened, for not being there when he was needed.
He shoved past the woman, uncaring when she almost lost her balance. He strode, his legs pumping furiously, towards the room ahead of them. He could hear the hum from here. The nine pods attached to the huge supercomputer. The eight lives that were held within the grasp of an rouge AI.
Should have been one of them. His mind thought, only fulfilling the hurricane of guilt that had swirled within him for the past months.
He heard the sound of Marina's clipboard falling to the ground, and then her hands encircling his arm. His head turned and blinked owlishly, Marina had never been one for physical confrontation. She was a psychotherapist, not a fighter.
"You could kill them all," pleadingly: "You could die!" Her voice finally cracked in frustration and pain, "They're safe there Gavin, no worries, no memories, nothing!" She was almost in tears now, her face a mask of desperation. Pity wormed its way into his heart. He would be leaving her all alone here. All alone in an empty laboratory, with absolutely no contact with the outside world, a laboratory that was falling into disrepair every second with dwindling food supplies. He shoved that new guilt into a little box under his heart with all the others, and threw away the key into the darkness of his mind. There would be time to mourn later, after all was said and done. She might need him, yes. It remained that they needed him more.
"We should be finding a way out!" She insisted blue eyes searching his face for some sign of acquiescence, "Instead of trying to fight a battle we know we will lose!"
Gavin had had enough, enough of this, enough of everything. His mind was made up, no questions, no reservations, no looking back. He shook her hands off wish a single pull oh his arms, and walked out of the small confined office that reeked with the stale smell of lies and failure. Marina stood frozen in the doorway, tears now streaming down her face.
They both knew what was most likely to happen. He was only a small man, walking into the jaws of death. The reaper stood ahead of him, his bone face twisted into a smile as he invited the newly dead and dying masses forwards. Come and try my game, death whispered coldly, Come and try little mortal man. Gavin walked on, knowing but unheeding to the unspoken words of the billions who had walked this path before him.
Gavin watched, with a sort of detached interest as his hands flexed outwards and pushed at a small door set into a recess. It swung open, with a whisper of a sound. They hadn't seen the need to lock it, nothing, ,not even a fucking mouse, stirred within these hollow walls. No the only cause to worry was staring him in the face, in a manner of speaking.
The room the door revealed to him was large and round, the same monotonous color of every other wall in the facility. Yet it was not the walls that all people saw first. No what a persons eye was drawn towards first was the metal and plastic monstrosity that clung to the ceiling like an overgrown parasite. It was the AI GLaDOS. It was huge and bulbous, bits of hardware stuck to it willy-nilly its white plastic casings a direct anti-thesis of the rest of the room. In times past one of those massive antenna might have swiveled around and stared at him, eyes glowing like the hounds of hell, but now the woman made of wires and chips was dead. Or as good as anything that could not 'die' could be considered dead.
Nestled at the base of the round platform that circled the lowest part of the AI there were nine, pods. Thick tangles of wire almost obscured them, as if they had only recently overgrown the area. It was sickening to see it now. Something that had once been the light of his life, the thing that would make him famous, wealth, safe.
He passed the pods, passed the people inside, his eyes skipping over faces. All of them friends, coworkers, and in a way his messed up family. Good people, people whom he had condemned to a fate worse than death. There bodies withering away while their minds lived elsewhere, unknowing of the monster of death lurking just at the edges of there vision. All because he hadn't noticed in time, because he hadn't been there.
Her reached the final pod, the only empty of the nine. Closing his eyes he pressed his hand to the door. His palm throbbed, not in a painful way, but as if his heart hand just skipped a beat and his whole body had seized for just an instant. It hissed open, spilling clouds of pure white oxygen into the air. He turned Marina, silly stupid Marina, stood at the edge of the room, eyes scared frieghtedn, all pupils on a field of white. It was funny, apparently he scared her shitless now.
What fun he thought sarcasticly
"If you want to help Marina, fight from the outside while I do what I can from within." he offered her a final smile. Then he turned once more and faced his fate head on.
The door hissed closed behind him, and he could feel himself growing faint. For a single moment he was overwhelmed with fear, but then his mind cleared and her reviewed the facts.
It would be a long battle, he would probably lose, but he didn't care. Not anymore anyway.
The world faded out.
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Run_operation:ANIMuS_fullimersion(.)exe
....
New player found:
searching status
......
Gavin Jordan, log in?
pasword
...
xxxxxxx
accepted.
Assigning Status:
Medic
Game Start in:
3
3
1