Operation: Learning Boundaries
Location: [Unknown]
Subject: Ark Thompson/ James Ford(?)/Prisoner 24601
Time: 2169/ 14 years until the events of Eden Prime
"What the hell are you?" The voice of the dying man brought back home. The one who I had thrown into the cargo container was helmetless now, looking at me with fear in his green eyes. He still had the freckles of youth on his face, and couldn't have been older than 25. Yet, here he was, a kill about to die for his cause.
I looked down to my hand, ignoring the feeling of familiarity this scene was bringing me. But instead of the glowing light that had defined this encounter the time previous, my hands were simply that, my hands.
I turned to my left, searching for Director Dracul to come and make his appearance. I just saw void.
"What is going on?" I growled out.
"You were killing me." I whirled around to see the solider walking towards me. His skin was slowly rotting with every step he took, making my stomach flip uncomfortably as his eyes slowly rolled down his face. He came to a stop inches from my face, the smell of death filling my senses.
"You were destroying my future and my past. What gives you the right to kill me? I was someone's son, brother, lover. You took that all away from me!" He was just a skull by this point, staring at me with empty eye sockets.
I took a step backwards, then another. With a scream, I turned and fled into the void.
My eyes popped opened with a force the surprised even me. I would have rolled off my cot onto the floor but a wall of pain stopped me. I could feel what felt like razor blades slowly being dragged down my skin, especially on my chest. Why would my chest hurt?
That's right, I got shot three times and had ribs broken.
"Holy hell, Ark, you're a genius!" I shouted into the ceiling.
"Ark, in the absence of a defined intelligence quotient, calling yourself a genius would be a technical impossibility." Yea, Twos was back to spy/help me.
"Twos, I want a double hamburger, Coca-Cola, and half a gallon of morphine!" I shouted, only half joking. The fact that I couldn't breathe without any pain was the half joking part.
"I lack the authorization to prescribe any medical equipment other than those that have already been applied. Our records lack knowledge of 'double hamburgers' or 'Coca-Cola'." Well, it was worth a shot.
"How… bad is it?"
"Unknown. Due to your alien physiology, any analysis of injury is impossible to complete without an extensive autopsy." I flinched. "However, external examinations suggest three mass acceleration rounds hit you, but were dissipated by armor. The discoloration of skin would be indicative of broken ribs, but scans used to ascertain internal damage were inconclusive. Also, evidence of third degree burns on the inner forearms seem to not to originate from combat."
Whoa, what? Burns? I managed to pull myself together and sit up in my cot, abet with a good degree of pain in my chest area. Feeling like I was moving concrete, I pulled my arms in front of me, taking note of the white bandages that covered my forearms.
Why did I not have medigel, you ask. Surly in the 22nd century, gauze would be a thing of the past? Well, to correctly apply medigel you need an omni-tool. Omni-tools have this nasty ability to hack things, like doors. Not the type of things you want to give to a prisoner.
Regardless, I began to unwrap the surprisingly well done coverings with trepidation. I didn't remember hurting both my forearms in the fight, but adrenaline was a funny thing. I once heard that a woman flipped a whole car off her baby while juiced up on that stuff. A car!
I never heard of a guy's hands glowing with light, though. I should really get that checked out.
"It is not advisable to remove gauze from burns so soon after the injury, Ark." I ignored her (it), and with one last turn, let the gauze fall to the ground.
Once, when I was in sixth grade, I branded myself with an iron. It hurt, and it eventually bloated up in giant puss bubbles that would burst and make it feel like I was being burned all over again. The discoloration of the skin was still present more than 6 years later, the day I had disappeared into this universe.
I looked like someone had burned me with that iron, and then rubbed some sort of black ink into the still healing skin. It was horrible. I bleached and threw up until I was overcome with dry heaves, before simply staring at the matching brands on each of my upper forearms.
It was the symbol of the 30 Coins and it was one me.
"What the fuck." Was all I managed to say. I was stamped… like a piece of goddamn luggage. Like I was somebody's toy they had slapped their name on.
My mind was… a mess. I mean, what was I supposed to feel? Anger, fear, or confusion? It all mixed into a primal glue that left me dumfounded. I just stared at my branded arms and drooled like the blind idiot I was.
"It appears your physiology is fighting off the infection with ease; however, increase breathing suggests distress. Do you need medical assistance?"
My eye twitched. "No, but I need you to deliver a message."
"I have no access to any sentient beings beyond this facility, excluding very limited contact via the extranet." The AI stated with a tone that almost bordered on sympathy. But the tone was lost on me in my… confusion.
"I want you to tell Dracul that I am not his toy! I have rights, morals, goals! I am a fucking person and if he thinks he can get away with BRANDING me, he is an inbred idiot!" And then my rage induced strength left me as quickly as it had come, leaving me to collapse to the floor in a heap. I managed to lean against the wall pitifully.
"And I also want my briefcase back!" I muttered.
"I shall… attempt to confer this message to the Director at the first available opportunity." I barely acknowledged the reply as I sunk into the safety of my own mind.
Needless to say, everything hurt. My body hurt from the fighting, my mind hurt from the questions, and my emotions hurt from the branding. I couldn't live like this. I could handle the fictional universe, the deceptively simple mission Michael had given me with… not ease, but functionality.
'Your job is to survive this cycle anyway you can, period. You keep this…" he picked up a Zero Halliburton case, shacking it in my face "… and its contents safe at any cost, or you will lose everything."' That had seemed so simple then, but not now. I had nearly failed the first stipulation, considering the three bullet wounds that rested in my chest. As for the briefcase, it was lost and out of reach, but considering I had not 'lost everything' signified that it was relatively safe.
But this? Thrown in a base of black ops soldiers lead by a psychopath that seemed to originate from the real world (how else would he know about Michael)? Discovering I was modified at the genetic level, effectively making me an alien? Having the entity I communicated the most with be an A.I. specifically designed to spy on me?
It was bullshit. Plan and simple.
So, I did what I always did when I encounter bullshit. I closed my eyes and took a breath through the nose before letting out through the month. Such a minor thing, but hey, what else was there? Air in, air out.
"Were you watching?" I did not need to elaborate on what.
"Yes. My programs were blocked to prevent assistant to you in accordance with my protocol, by I managed to record and analyze the engagement."
"I lost." I stated matter of factly.
"Negative. All hostiles were eliminated indicating a successful mission in accordance with 30 Coins parameters."
"I would have died. According to my guess, that would have been a failure of one of your directives." I said with a grim smirk. Even my own death seemed to be full of humor now.
"That result is inconclusive. Data gathered during experimentation committed during the earliest phases of captivity indicates your species is much more robust than appearances indicate. It could easily be assumed you would have survived without outside interaction."
"Although my ego thanks you, you're wrong. I was down behind enemy lines, with no means of defense. I was also dull enough to be BRANDED…" I spat on the ground. "without noticing. I would have been captured, at least."
I slowly stood up, wincing horrendously as I did so. I was totally sure I really should not have been up and moving around just yet, but sitting alone in a cot was not my idea of recovery. Perhaps I was more robust than I thought. Regardless, I managed to half-stumble to across my home to the workbench that had hid an armory behind it yesterday. Today though, it only had one weapon presented to me on its service.
A machete covered in dry blood. It was mine of course. The machete, not the blood. Opening a small cubby, I removed a can of oil and a dirty rag. With careful strokes, I began to remove the evidence of yesterdays… encounter.
"Do you see what I am saying, Twos. I have been here for what? A year? A year of constant training with every weapon imaginable and more. Yet, I lost! And I lost enough to be marked as PROPERTY because of it. Do you understand what this means?"
"Ark, the combination of injury and excursion is not recommended. Perhaps you should rest." That suggestion went right out the window as I scrubbed with vigor. I was lost in my mind once more, mixing my knowledge of the universe I had gain from affair with the first-hand experience I had gain yesterday. It came to a startling conclusion.
"Twos, I am screwed. If I could be incapacitated by eight men, what happens when I run into a team of Asari commandos? Or a Krogan warlord? These are beings that could have dedicated a hundred years to learning how to kill and maim, possibly more. I won't walk away with brands on my arms and a couple broken ribs; I won't be walking away at all!" that terrible anger had returned, my movement erratic.
"OWW!" I yelped as my carelessness resulted in a straight cut across my hand, my now clean machete sporting a bloody coat once again. I examined it quickly, determining it was only superficial as I rolled my wheeled chair into the bathroom. The tissues where soon soaked through, but I found the bandages and wrapped the injury. Then I warped up the brands, unwilling to stare at the disfigurement longer than necessary.
"Twos, if I am really going to survive people like those, then I can't just be able to fight. I have to be something they have never seen before, an enigma not even the most stone cold professionals can decipher. I need… a gimmick."
The pain became almost unbearable as my brain was overwhelmed with just as much pain as my body. Tired, defeated, and injured, I crawled to my cot and fell into a dark sleep.
Subject: Director Dracul, [Classified]
"'…I have rights, morals, goals! I am a fucking person and if he thinks he can get away with BRANDING me, he is an inbred idiot!...And I also want my briefcase back!' Message concludes." Dracul raised an eyebrow, unimpressed by the outburst.
"Thank you, 481 for delivering Prisoner 24601… message. Any other abnormal behavior?" He sighed mentally every time he had to refer to the child as 24601. His species deserved better than being labeled with simple numbers, even if half of them where traitors.
"Director, he voiced several thoughts that indicated his displeasure with your training." The A.I. designated 481-515-234-2, but was colloquially called Twos by the child, stated emotionlessly. It had been acting flawlessly, training the boy and reporting all progress back to Dracul. If only he had had access to this technology back in the real world, he could indoctrinate subjects much faster.
"It is in the nature of sentient beings to resist imprisonment, I asked for abnormal behavior."
"Director, you misunderstand." A low growl emerged from his throat at the insinuation, but he contained it. "Prisoner 24601 was not opposed to imprisonment, but seems to be accusing you of not training him properly for the combat he seems to expect an encounter with."
Instantly, the dark mood that had taken Dracul evaporated. A smile took hold on his face, the smallest of chuckles emerged from his throat. He had won.
You see, he had taken a gamble when he had branded the child with the mark of his people. Usually, the subjects had taken the branding one of two ways. The first, and by far the most common, group reacted in self-destructive ways. They killed themselves out of shame, cut their arms off in fear, or even turned into vegetables; the combination of being owned and dismantled simply too much for their psyche.
But the second group, rarer by far, got angry. They screamed at the world for a time, bleeding themselves of anger. Then, they decided that they really did not want to be marked again. They trained and molded themselves into creatures that could only be described with one word: dangerous.
The child, it seemed, had chosen the second path. And that path had a very interesting conclusion… initiation into the 30 Coins. And not this fictional version that he had created, but the legion that fought for the souls of man back in the real world.
He had taken the first step to creating an apprentice.
"481, I recommend you administer more shocks to keep the prisoner docile, it simply won't do for it to be having this much independent action." The high pitch squeal of one the useless Cerberus technician reminded him that he was not alone. He didn't have the luxury of being free of these roaches all the time, he still had to put on a show for Jack Harper, but that didn't mean he had to tolerate it.
So, with two strides, he had positioned himself behind the insolent brat. He really didn't have to do much; he just rested his hand on the neck of the soldier before squeezing. The cervical vertebrae gave way easily to Draculs grip, leaving the technician paralyzed and his windpipe crushed.
"481, we will complete this conversation in my quarters. The rest of you will carry on." He ignored the open months and blatant fear in the faces of the remaining technicians as he stalked away from the control center, dark mood having returned to his mind. Perhaps sensing the mood that had overcome their leader, the Cerberus personal fled at his approach as he moved deeper into the complex, towards the barracks and his current home.
It was a Spartan apartment. In his mind, all the objects gathered in this fictional world would be lost when he left it, regardless if they were useful or interesting, so he didn't bother to collect them. He moved to his terminal, activating it with a precision that would indicate he had logged many more hours with advanced technology than he actual had.
He checked the security cameras placed within the cell of the child, totally ignoring the feed of the now dead technician being carried out of the command center. The child was once again asleep, recovering from yesterday's encounter.
"481, what dangers did the child seem to expect?" Without the ever watching eyes of Cerberus personal, the title of 'Prisoner 24601' was quickly abandon.
"The subject ramblings seemed to indicate that he expects combat with the most dangerous fragments of society. He specifically referred to Asari Commandos and Krogan Warlords, but it is more accurate to assume that the subject was referring to the elite fighters present in the galaxy in general."
Dracul frowned. The child had the advantage in this area. When his master ordered him to follow the child into a work of fiction, he knew there were certain obstacles that had to be overcome. Chief among these was general ignorance to the affairs of this universe. Apparently, the child had no such restrictions. And that knowledge had manifested in fear, despite the fact that the child had just won a (abet close) victory.
Most time victory resulted in overconfidence, not fear. How curious.
"Interesting, we shall have to modify the simulations to reinforce confidence and prepare the child for these 'elite fighters'. Any other developments?"
The A.I. seemed to pause for a fraction of a second. "The subject seems to think that even superior marshal skill will not guarantee success. The subject suggested a… gimmick could overcome this."
"A gimmick?"
"Yes, Director. In context, it means an unusual tactic or device that…"
"SILENCE!" the Director hissed. "I know what the word means, fool. Leave me."
The A.I. followed the directions of its director, as it was forever required to by its programing, leaving the being now as Dracul to contemplate his situation. His dark eyes took on a red taint in the dim light of his room, as the wheels of intelligence turned behind them.
"I can give you something far greater than gimmicks, child. I can give you pure power, nothing less." He flexed his hand once, and the room plunged into darkness.
Hello, again. I first off want to thank my reviewers for answering my questions; it really helped put my mind at ease in regards to my progress. You see, due to the fact you are viewing the story as it progresses, it has also become your story as well (sorta). This means we have to communicate with each other to find the best way this story can develop, and that is why I have asked you questions.
To that end, I have a couple minor questions:
Is my character a bitch? Sorry for the language, but does he complain too much and generally annoy you? 'bitch,bitch, bitch, I have been kidnapped by evil man, bitch, bitch… Does anyone love me? Bitch, bitch'I really don't want… I believe the term is wangst (An exaggerated, disproportional degree of angst that makes a character annoying).
Is he a… *glup… Mary Stu? He is sort strong: weapons training, foreknowledge, alien physic that gives unusual benefits. I try to show him still overmatched and losing to compensate.
Thanks for Reading and answering those questions, you have really helped me out! What follow are just some random writers drabbles:
What I'm attempting to do with Dracul in his segment s establish that, he too, is a self-insert. However, he has been inserted into a universe he (unlike Ark) has never seen. This leaves him at a disadvantage to Ark, who is very informed about the Mass Effect galaxy. But, Dracul is still in a better position than Ark. Dracul seems to be a very seasoned commander and combatant that managed to work his way to a Director position in an Alliance Black Ops organization in less than 3 years. You don't do this by being stupid… Also, he can snap a guy's neck like a twig.