"You're Terminated, fucker."
- Sigourney Weaver, Alien: Covenant
The year was 2022. The place was the Tyrell Industrial Plaza, but it might as well have been the Nakatomi Plaza with the way things were heading. Under the hail of a torrential rainstorm, a couple of punks of the cybernetic persuasion tried to overthrow the company's Replicant registry program by stealing a nuclear warhead and detonating an EMP that would crash the entire system. Instead, some of the night shift wound up defusing a very different smoking bombshell.
"How's the alignment?" asked a low paid security goon who looked suspiciously like he was wearing a Star Wars helmet.
"Just needed a little firmed up around the fenders," said another Star Wars-helmeted officer. He wiped the droplets off of his waterproof diagnostic reader, a strange palm device that looked like a miniature infrared receiver stuffed into an old Tamagotchi casing. "The specs say everything's sturdy where it matters and has a good amount of bounce where it's needed. There's practically no sag on her."
"Did you see her little acrobat show back there?" said a third Comicon reject. "She must have been conditioning herself for months. Practically did all the work for us!"
The guards were standing in the downpour with a flotilla of automated artillery modules stationed half a parking lot away. The guard with the scanner held it toward one of the vehicles roughly resembling a cement mixer.
The contents of the machine were sealed within ten tons of solid metal, but the images on the diagnostic reader revealed everything. A textureless two-dimensional diagram of a female Replicant flickered in the margin of the video feed. Trixie was shown hovering inside the centrifuge through detailed close-ups taken from a dozen different angles. The close-ups of her face showed a look of vacancy: eyes glazed open, mouth slightly indicating fear or discomfort.
All Trixie ever wanted was to weightlessly waft in the air and have her private details erased from the Replicant registry. She was certainly going to get both of those things now, just not in the way she had been planning. Tyrell's grunts were no match for her, but no amount of cartwheels or leg grapples could prevent her from landing a perfect 10 straight into a portable multi-stage Replicant impoundment factory hidden underneath the pavement.
"Is 'deer in headlights' part of standard operating procedure?" asked one guard.
"They can get like when they're under inspection. She'll be fine," someone else assured. "This is all just a bad dream for her that she'll wake up from after a few hard reboots."
The defense modules violently collided together as they worked. There would be a great ordeal of bumping and grinding until one unit transferred its cargo into another through an airtight seal. The machines continued this cycle in deafening but organized fashion, systematically passing around the Replicant from shell to shell until they each had a chance to make their own modifications. The human eye couldn't see what was happening inside of the tankers or what product was being passed between, but it left the impression of a group of angry diesel engines committing something unsafe for the environment.
The cement mixer urgently hauled its cargo over to something that looked more like a giant chrome pendulum. Trixie's electronic readout turned into a mishmash of static interference once she reached the second checkpoint in the assembly line. Most of the security team knew the rest by heart.
"That big loud thing she just came out of was the Cyclops Module," a guard explained to some of his less informed colleagues. "He takes care of your initial capture and surface reconditioning. He just bumped her up in the queue and handed her off to the Unicorn Module."
"What's the Unicorn's function?" a second guard asked. "Granting wishes?"
"Neural detailing," someone else said. "It can get pretty touchy. Cross her currents around too much and she'll spend the rest of her life talking like Harrison Ford doing a catatonic voice-over. That's why they don't do this by hand anymore."
The entire squadron shuddered.
Smoke rose through the rain as the modules worked undeterred. Every now and then two of the vehicles would cross their pistons together, trade a certain counterfeit object through an anonymous hydraulic tube, and rev apart in their separate ways. It was an intense job and the machines heaved and hoed in multiple definitions of the word.
"And now she's getting warmed up for the Griffon Module," said a guard. "Total internal frame defabrication. It dissolves whatever the Replicant was using for bones and replaces it with higher quality materials that are only allowed in official company drones. If she rolls out of Stage 3 with all of her hardware still in order, she's made it past the worst of her QA checks."
"I don't get it," said one young officer who only begun his promising future as a corporate schmuck a few days prior. "Why don't we just shoot her and take her corpse apart for scrap metal?"
"Are you kidding?" one of the others snorted. "That would be like burying a couple thousand Atari cartridges in a desert in New Mexico just because one of your games didn't sell well."
"We're not going through all this trouble just to turn her back into…" the first guard said in an implicit tone.
"No way. She couldn't resume those functions if she wanted to. All of her peripherals are getting soldered," another answered. "The committee doesn't want another Code Rachael. This beaut's a pure war beast now, but she might show a strong tendency for the seductive from time to time. The process tends to build off of the Replicant's original designations. It keeps things more 'familiar' to them."
The Griffon unlocked its hydraulics and passed its work to the next in line.
"Dragon Module," the guard with the diagnostic reader said. "Now comes the squishy part. It makes sure all of the Replicant's synth organs are registered to the proper authorities and swaps out any parts slowing down from wear and tear. This one was dumped in mint condition, so I doubt she'll need much."
An alert flashed in his palm.
"Guess I was wrong. That Nexus 8 kidney is under recall for being assembled in a high failure rate factory in Croatia. We just extended her expected operational time by about 10%."
The Dragon finished its task and quickly passed the Replicant down the chain.
"Now the Leprechaun's got 'er," said one guard. "This one covers the pseudo-dialysis part of the operation and brings the Replicant up to regulations. All of her vital fluids are drained out and recirculated with a strictly licensed Tyrell formula. Way more efficient than the stock stuff, but it has a habit of seizing up the organs if the merch starts acting out of line. They call it 'Giving them the T-Juice.'"
The Leprechaun surrendered its pot of gold to a sixth mobile drone, causing most of the guards to look surprised.
"She made it all the way to the Phoenix Unit. Impressive," one of them said.
"What's so special about it?" asked another.
"Most of these flesh hacks get redesignated at Level 5. Those are your basic field soldiers. You start hitting diminishing returns if you try to push them any further. The really high quality ones can get tuned up as Level 6s or 7s. They're the ones protecting some foreign dignitary or guarding the nuke keys."
"So what's the Phoenix do?"
"It cures a Replicant's entire physical architecture in a rigorously controlled 5000 degree environment. If you thought this one was nimble before, she's going to make your head spin once she cools down and does some stretches."
The Phoenix activated its power plant, glowed orange for a while, then gradually turned gunmetal again. Its transfer port slammed into the last vehicle in the convoy and roughly sent Trixie to her final stop.
"She's made it all the way up to the Manticore Unit. Don't get to see many of those," another guard said.
"Let me guess… neural expansion?" another asked.
"Bingo," answered the one watching the diagnostics. "We'll have this slinky little bucket of bolts speaking in 500 languages and solving differential equations before she knows what's tapping her circuits."
Five minutes later, the hull of the Manticore peeled open like an origami flower made out sheet steel. Rain steamed off of the hot metal as the Replicant slowly rose up from her knees. The guard's diagnostic tool performed an automatic scan and displayed a series of snapshots.
REPLICANT (F)
NEXUS 8 WDV71673DX
DES: Trixie
INCEPT DATE: 09 JUNE, 2022
Trixie's eyes swirled in a rainbow of colors as she ran through her boot cycle, before finally settling on holographic hazel.
Physically, she looked exactly the same as before she was impounded, when she was whirling through bullets and vaulting over security gates. But in terms of load-bearing capacity and memory resources, she was a different story. She was wearing a skin-bonding black array trimmed in a conductive blue neon grid—the default packaging for a Repocant freshly swept off the street.
"Looks like she's in the wrong Syd Mead movie, eh?" One of the guards elbowed his friends as he joked. They all shared a chuckle.
The outfit changed shape as she stepped down from the Manticore platform. Much like Trixie herself, her new uniform was sleak, practical, and semi-transparent in a few places. She pulled her optional plastic poncho over her head to keep her delicate face dry from the rain.
"Current owner unregistered," she said as if she were an automated recording. "Temporarily self-registering to nearest proximity human bioform until final executive approval." Her eyes curiously scanned as she spoke. She gazed toward the squadron of guards while addressing no one specific. "What is thy bidding, master?"
"First thing's first," answered a guard. "Are there any more you leaky greasebags lurking around here? We already sorted out your tough guy buddy."
He pointed to the flaming ruins of an overturned semi trailer several yards away. Iggy's charred remains were slumped over the wheel. Trixie glanced indifferently toward the wreck, then returned her attention to the guards.
"No Replicants, but there's a human named Ren at the launch station," she answered softly. "You can still catch him if you shut off his access and remote disarm the warheads in Silo B. He doesn't have much to tell you, he was just trying to help. Try not to interrogate him too hard before you cancel his contract." She straightened her index finger into the shape of a pistol.
"You're the only one left?" asked another guard.
Trixie nodded, curling her lips into a small smile. As her backlit eyes slowly panned over the row of guards, she glared addictively toward a loose cigarette dangling from one's mouth. She glanced at him, blinked, tilted her head slightly. He suspiciously looked back and forth like she was a cobra that was liable to either shed her skin in front of him or bite his head off.
"Can't a girl get a drag?" She asked timidly under the harsh pelt of the rain. "I feel like 30 hover trucks just landed on top of me."
The guard shrugged and handed the lady his cigarette. As she closed her eyes and smoked contently to herself, another guard stepped in to get a better look at her. She smirked through the corner of her lips while his eyes were trailing somewhere between her neck and her thighs.
"You're looking at restricted assets of Tyrell Heavy Chemicals. A little bit above your pay grade, farm boy."
"Maybe I should rustle up some more cows so they give me a raise," he sneered in return.
Trixie answered back by taking a long drag and quietly exhaling poison into his face, subtly mouthing "moo" through puckered lips. She flicked the cigarette into a puddle and stamped it out under the toe of her shoe, never asking the first guard if he'd like his smoke back.
"Ahh, that should be enough to clear out my exhaust," she purred in the rain. "So what's on the menu for tonight?"
"I guess we'll just head you over to the Used lot and let the committee figure out what you're good for," said one guard.
"After an orientation like that, it better be more important than throwing on a bonnet and pushing a broom around," Trixie bitterly replied.
She stepped into formation with the grace of a tank wearing ballet slippers. They walked together into the geometric Tyrell facade and summoned the tallest elevator to the ground floor. The guards waited for the elevator to arrive with their fingers cautiously near to their triggers. Trixie brushed her hair out her clear hood and sighed in boredom.
Several guards escorted her into the cabin once it reached ground level. They kept a close eye on her reactions, and an even closer eye on her finer feminine details.
The doors closed. The elevator began its assent.
Author's note: No, really. They're all wearing Rebel Alliance helmets. Go back and watch that part in Black Out 2022 again.