Machine Organisms
It started as a fight and became something else.
It took months of work and long hours spent pouring through old reconnaissance photos and half-assed satellite imagery just to find the place. Sokovia was as backwater as it got. Most of the aerial topography came from U2 flyovers back when the country was part of the USSR. There was little current-day intelligence on the mountains of Sokovia, and even less on what secrets those mountains contained.
But the hard work paid off, and he got the location of an old vaccination facility from a defunct Soviet record depository. The place was tucked away in the peaks, accessible by one road, and had been supposedly abandoned for thirty years—which was why his gut told him that was the perfect place for scientific terrorists to breed a weaponized sterility plague.
His gut was not wrong. The front door blew off its hinges with one kick, and sent scientific terrorist heads swiveling in his direction. He counted twenty combatants in total, all stacking drums of vile liquid, all wearing the yellow uniforms of Advanced Idea Mechanics. The beekeeper helmets hid all expression, but their frozen body language did enough to communicate their surprise.
"So," said Steve Rogers, pulling the shield from his back, "you boys want to pull those shock prods or whistle Dixie?"
((()))
I see him through the eyes and ears of my fodder, and for a moment, my intellect staggers. I tell myself it's just the synaptic backlash of manipulating the minds of every soldier in the base, but that is a lie. I am staggered by his speed, his brutality, his effortless efficiency. I had no doubt that the Captain would unearth our Sokovian operation. He has a blend of tenacity and idealism that sees him through deceptions where his paltry intelligence cannot. But I had hoped he would find our facility too late, not now. Not now.
I swarm him, all twenty bodies at once. The other thirty I call in from across the facility, activating the neural override caps beneath each of their helmets. They surge toward him, tasks abandoned. They serve me as would my arm or leg. I am everywhere, in each of them. In them I finally have a body to match my mind.
He cannot win.
I move in, shooting and stabbing and punching with a hundred arms, a hundred eyes, a hundred selves. I see him flit from sight to sight. Hard to track. He exists always in my many peripheries, always striking, always hurting. I know his effectiveness from the injuries I feel. A body drops here, another there, brains darking from the overload to their pain centers. I override their brains, pushing the control caps to their limit. No part of me should feel pain. I keep fighting.
I have felt his shield many times before, but never in the body of a man. Punishingly, unrelentingly heavy, it breaks what it hits. I feel a leg snap backwards at the knee, and one of my faces plants into concrete, red hurt turning to sweet black.
The black is temporary. The override puts pawns back in the fight as quickly as he can knock them out. He makes no progress. With the pain centers of my many minds deadened, my small army has become unstoppable. Victory means he must kill them. Perhaps in his prime he would have no compunction for that, but I doubt he has the mettle for such blood-work in today's world. He has grown soft.
I throw eight bodies in a tackle. They slow him. Another three pile on to immobilize him. Shock prods hit him across the back, enough volts to murder a horse. He twists under the prods, trying to raise the shield. I see a weakness in his guard and volt him again. He spasms, loses what balance he has, and tumbles to the floor. I can see the agony on his face, and then he screams. It is the sweetest sound ever tasted.
"That's it." I speak through a dozen mouths. "Choke, you sanctimonious genetrash."
He does not. He stands, pushes back the prods. I apply more, and realize he is not screaming.
A strength that should not be fills his muscles and erupts from his throat as a roar. More volts. Nothing. The shield rises, an impossibility. He lashes out, knocking the prods away, pounding my bodies. He becomes a blur once more, but his strikes have become focused.
I lose limbs. My minds go dark one by one, a sensation like going blind one color at a time. No, the minds are fine. I'm losing control caps. I see him hitting the helmets. He has figured it out, deduced the caps' existence. How?
The answer comes to me: I spoke. The choral voice alerted him to the ruse. He learned, and adjusted accordingly.
The shield flies from his arm, knocking heads three and four at a time. I am nearly blind.
No. No, no, no!
"You almost had me, there." He grabs the last ant by the collar and looks into its hijacked eyes. His stare is judgement incarnate, with all the hypocrisy that entails. "Slick try, you bastard. How about you come fight me like a man?"
Like a man. Base temptation. An insult meant to blind my logic and draw me into some pointless, direct conflict. It's a transparent tactic. He knows it. I know it.
We both know that it will work, too, for cowardice is not in my makeup.
I was designed only for killing.
((()))
Rogers cinched the shield tight to his forearm and waited. He focused on his breathing, on keeping his heart steady. The fight had not fatigued him—few things could—but his body felt off. He breathed deeply to snuff the anger. Anger had its uses, but it clouded his mind. The breathing provided a valve to ease out the rage, or just bottle it up for later. Rogers would not know which until he came face to face with the bastard behind this place.
A hatch in the floor opened, and MODOK hovered into view. His chair, armored legs, and giant head looked as absurd as ever, but the combat harness strapped across his bulk was not. Laser cannons, acid throwers, and a few other unfamiliar gadgets stared down at him. He readied the shield.
"You really thought this would work?" Rogers said, gesturing at the casks of dubious liquid around them. "Didn't think someone would find out, put an end to it?"
MODOK usually liked to talk. This time it did not. A blast of acid launched from its temple apparatus, headed right for Rogers's face. The Captain ducked, caught most of it on the shield and let the rest splash by. A drop of it hit his shoulder, singeing flesh. The anger returned, red and immediate. Rogers leapt onto his foe, one foot braced against the ridiculous hover chair's arm, the other on one of the equally-ridiculous stubby legs.
"Get off of me!" shouted MODOK. One of the miniguns swiveled around and fired. Rogers caught it with his free palm, holding the spinning barrels at bay. Bullets pounded the ceiling. Lights shattered. Glass and plaster rained.
The minigun's report was in his ear, deafening. He pushed, breaking the weapon off its mount. The shots stopped.
"You cannot break everything, Captain!"
Rogers replied with a punch, then another, then another. It was easy hitting such a large face, and the punches felt great. He liked to lose himself in a good punch. The sting in his knuckles, the shock that rippled up his arm, the grunt of exhalation with each impact, it was all just heat. Heat that he clung to, sought out, for the way it killed the thoughts that came for him in the times between the hits. Heat that burned away the ill-comfort that cloyed in the alcoves of his self, in the disappeared faces and places his restless mind returned to if it wanted a wound reopened, a dead pain exhumed. Heat to melt the God-damned ice.
MODOK swerved, tried to get away. "Come here!" Steve growled, stuffing a boot in the giant mouth. A spatulate tooth shattered under his toe, and he didn't care.
The mindless slaves pissed him off. The audacity of this half-man pissed him off. The fact that the entire world was filled with people who wanted to play god pissed him off. It seemed the anger had not left, just been bottled. Fine, then. He lost himself in it. He punched again, hitting an eyeball. Again, right in an ear. He punched until he broke the hover chair's controls and the two combatants slammed to the floor, then he kept going until the very large head lost consciousness and lay, drooling, on the tile.
((()))
He hauled the comatose computer man out into the snow. It was easy to imagine Sokovia's utilitarian buildings shrouded in perpetual winter, and Rogers imagined that wasn't far off. The identicard still had reception this far out, which was a miracle, and he used it to remotely call his Quinjet for pickup. The jet's status was green, its ETA three minutes. Rogers breathed deep, but the anger and heat had already fled.
MODOK stirred. "I hate you," he said.
"Likewise." Rogers checked the identicard. Two minutes.
"I hate you," MODOK repeated. "And I do not know why."
That made his head turn. Rogers looked at the fatheaded machine. "What does that mean?"
MODOK rolled its eyes. "I should appreciate you, Captain. We should be allies bonded by mutual pity."
"I don't pity you, MODOK."
"You should, just as I pity you." MODOK closed its eyes, the moment of lucidity disappearing as it slurred itself back to sleep. "Two machines trapped doing what we were designed for."
Rogers was quiet. The Quinjet pulled in low over the treetops and hovered in for a landing. Any thoughts of maybe were obliterated in its all-consuming downwash.
The flight home was long, as was everything that followed.
Author's Note: My fourth (and shortest) annual Fourth of July Captain America story. Missed out on writing one last year. I won't miss another one. Hope you enjoyed it.