"Lifeforms. You tiny little lifeforms. You precious little lifeforms. Where are you? Dodo dododo do."
- Data, Star Trek: Generations
Chaos ensued as a massive demon crawled through the streets. It carved a path of destruction by sweeping its hapless enemies away with its claws and incinerating the buildings with its fiery breath. Its annihilation was absolute until it happened upon an unusual structure: A mobile trailer with a large metal cylinder standing up on its bed.
The demon steered away from its current path and crouched low to the ground, sniffing around the base of the cylinder as it detected a suspicious scent. It lunged straight for the top of the structure with claws outstretched, wrenching the lid open with mechanical strength. A bright teal mist of electrified nanomites rose out of the chamber, followed by the sounds of a malfunction alarm and a bloodcurdling scream. The demon reached in with one arm and plucked a squirming dark blue shape out from the bottom of the cooling tower like a diabolical magician pulling a terrified rabbit out of his hat.
The demon opened its maw and dropped the thing deep into its churning gullet, devouring it in a single bite.
It was a typical Monday for the members of GHQ's Antibody division. Personnel routinely took inventory of all the combat gear, inspected the munitions racks, and made any necessary repairs to the Endlaves. There was idle chatter about this insurgency and that skirmish, but no one was expecting the acutely curved and fully saturated datastream that was about to be uploaded into their private domain.
"Hey, uh… Kenji?" Rowan called over from one the bunker's centerpieces: A five-story AI drone hunched motionlessly on its treads. Its forevisor and its environmental scanners were shaped eerily like a giant's face. "Your toy is about 50 kilograms off from its standard weight. And this little blinking dot says it has a new invoice for you."
Rowan was pointing to a small console attached to the machine's hydraulic leg.
Kenji lived a bored and unchallenged life as the Antibodies' counterintrusions expert. He was leaning back in his desk chair playing Tetris on his console (custom-ported from an unreleased DOS prototype) and slurping out of a can of Mountain Dew Gamer Fuel as he blasted the latest ONE OK ROCK hit over the budget amphitheater stationed around his desk. As soon as he heard Rowan's comment, he instantly swiveled his seat around and lit up with excitement.
"Sweet! Let's see what he dug up."
Kenji flew to the machine's base and pushed Rowan away from the control panel. His fingers blazed across the tiny translucent keypad at maddening speed as he grinned like a child opening his first Christmas present. The GHQ members crowded around the front of the robot as Kenji worked to open its motorized vault.
"Were you expecting this?" asked Guin.
"Yeah, I set Sleipnir to recover any OCSes he came across during the last mission," Kenji answered as he typed, stopping only to take another short swig of the Dew.
"OCSes?" asked Daryl.
"Objects of Cybertropic Significance, scrub." Kenji snorted to his Antibody colleague.
"Objects of Cisterntronic what?" Mana blinked as she asked.
The artillery drone's two red beaming eyes became active as it switched from Idle Processing to Diagnostic Mode. The front of the robot opened like a titanium rib cage. A hollow metal sphere roughly the size of a car slid out of the drone's interior on a series of pulleys. The globe split open on its hemisphere in several reinforced layers, peeling apart through a series of quick-acting safety levers. Foam seeped out of the depressurized cracks and gushed to the floor as the last layer of the shell folded back.
Tsugumi instantly burst out of the steaming fluid filling the storage cell, tossing her head back on instinct as her lungs gasped for fresh air. When her feet touched the bottom of the basin, she was wading up to her thighs in the toxic-smelling liquid.
"Enemy intel agents." Kenji gleefully sneered.
Still under the heavy medicinal effects of the quarantine chamber, Tsugumi was seemingly out cold on her feet. She looked like she was falling asleep while also panting like someone who had just finished an extreme workout. Her arms dangled limply at her sides. A steel brace rested against the back of her neck and kept her propped up so she wouldn't collapse back into the water. The synthetic preservatives that kept her body nourished while she was sealed off from the organic world were soaked through her mission jumpsuit, making the formfitting attire even more acquainted with her natural figure. Wires and serial plugs ran through her black hair and tangled over her communications headset, interfacing with portions of her own equipment to record her brainwaves and fill her mind with sweet dreams made of electric sheep. The imposing robotic structure surrounding her gave off the suggestion of a demon trapping the soul of its human priestess in a dark orb clutched close to its chest.
"It's a woman?" Rowan asked with a confused stare.
"It's that runt from Funeral Parlor," Daryl groaned.
"She's pretty cute… for a hacker lowlife," Emily said.
"Now there's a girl with some nice bits on her hard drive," said Segai.
"Looks pupal," Mana said, recalling her own not-explicitly-human lifecycle.
Kenji's hands fluttered across the keypad again. The monitors stationed around the drone switched to an impersonal clutter of x-rays, infrareds, and body scans. Each screen provided a detailed exploration of Planet Tsugumi.
"What's with the cat costume?" asked Guin, mostly unimpressed with the demonstration.
"Some of these rebels are weird like that. Maybe she was going for a gritty dystopian magical girl vibe," said Kenji.
"Does that make us the bad guys from Sailor Moon R?" asked Segai.
"I'm basically Black Lady," added the artist formerly known as Inori.
"Naw. They were too medieval-themed. We'd totally be the S villains to her," said Kenji. "She's thrown her last sparkly tiara and now she's stuck in one of Professor Tomoe's experiments."
Emily leaned to get a closer look at Tsugumi's bodysuit. The LED-studded silver and dark blue material was drenched down to the individual microfiber, strictly emphasizing the details her anatomy even more than if she were standing in the tank wearing nothing at all. The damp and shriveled construction could only be described as glued spandex. Her tactical suit had probably turned out to be the most unfortunate choice of clothing for where she wound up.
"Sheesh, that looks uncomfortable," Emily said with the corner of her mouth twisted into a wince. She brushed her nail across the surface of the fluid near Tsugumi's hip and slowly pulled her hand away. The containment gel stretched like clear melted rubber as it stuck to her finger.
"And kinda gross," she added, frantically shaking the liquid off of her hand.
"Sleipnir was built for frontline artillery and counter-hacking quarantine. User comfort isn't exactly part of its design mantra," said Kenji. "This goopy stuff might be an industrial silicon nitrate chlorine compound manufactured as a byproduct of Sleipnir's cooling system, but I'll bet it's the first time this punk has taken a bath in a while. I feel like it's missing something, though."
He scratched his chin for a moment, then shrugged. He poured the rest of his drink over the rim of the tank, mixing the chemicals Tsugumi waded in with a worthless and degrading assortment of empty carbs and artificial sugars. He crunched the can in his fist and tossed it behind his shoulder.
"That's more like it, babe. Something to sweeten you up," he snickered.
"So what do we do with her now? Torture a confession out of her?" Segai pondered sinisterly.
"Feed her to the swarm?" Mana asked cheerfully.
"Execute her?" Guin suggested coldly.
But Kenji was already working away at the keypad again, ignoring all of their suggestions.
"Let's pwn this n00b," he said.
"l33t," Mana agreed.
Only one screen appeared now: A black box populated with menus in bright pixelated lettering. It was the operating system for the drone's neural buffering applications, putting the power to rewrite Tsugumi's entire consciousness at Kenji's fingertips. Personality by electronic order.
He scrolled through the options. He accessed a list of promising roles that included "Nurse," "Fast Food Waitress," "Handmaid," "Accountant," and "Thermonuclear War." He skipped to a secret screen that only had one option: "Accelerated Recruitment."
"Sleipnir will do a number on her so she'll remember all of her fun hacking tricks but she'll be aligned with us," Kenji deviously explained. "Then we'll release her new and improved version on the rest of those Funeral Parlor bugs. Sure beats letting Ada scrape out her brain and having to listen to her brag about her new shiny perky ass for the next month."
Tsugumi's lips moved weakly under the sheet of her damp black hair. Her head swayed a fraction of an inch as she mumbled in her semi-consciousness.
"Fucking… creepo…"
"Sounds like her protocols aren't completely cracked," Kenji said in slight disappointment. "She can spend another week or two in the recycling bin."
He slammed his fist against the large red LOCK button on the vehicle's hull. Tsugumi was abruptly dunked back into the fuming chemicals before the steel shutters sealed over her head. The compartment was drawn back into the robot's fuselage on conveyors and securely hidden behind several feet of solid armor. The robot's eyes went black as it returned to its digital slumber.
"What if she's still resistant after you're done working on her?" asked Guin.
"Then we'll have to scratch her off of the assets list," Kenji answered. "Anything in Sleipnir's containment hubs gets dissolved in a couple of seconds when he boots into his self-cleaning mode."
"How long could that take?" asked Rowan.
"Well, he has the storage capacity to house ten threats for up to about 90 days... in extreme cases," Kenji said with a smirk. "You know, just in case we find a whole division of these rodents operating out of a gutter somewhere and decide to repackage them while Sleipnir still has to hang out behind enemy lines for a while."
"How can the subjects survive for that long?" asked Segai.
"Just look at our little script kitty here," Kenji said, patting his palm against the robot's transport hatch. "She's a pretty low-maintenance gal when you put 95% of her vitals in stasis, suspend her I/O operations, give her all the energy she needs through a super absorbent synthetic medium instead of having to feed her, and devote all of her mental resources to behavior re-education. It's just going to take forever to get her dried off when she's ready to go back out in the wild."
"Gives new meaning to plug and play, I guess." Rowan shrugged.
"More like cross-platform compatibility," Guin added.
Author's note: This has been the latest incident in the Let's Do Stuff to Tsugumi anthology.
Author's note 2: Some of the dialogue I originally wrote for this was waaay more explicit and raunchy (even more than it is now), but I toned it down because it was clashing with the lighthearted tone of the story (in a relative sense given the subject matter). And I just like writing everything in metaphor.