Chapter 1: The Syndicate Android
December, 1993…
Though the winter sun shone brightly outside, it was dark and gloomy within the basement of ServTech Solutions. The room, lit by long florescent tubes, was steel plated and as secure as a vault, and contained many incriminating secrets…for ServTech Solutions was covertly owned and operated by the Copper Lugnut Confederation—one of New York City's worst robot mobs.
Elec Man didn't think much of their name, whatever their reputation. He thought even less of their security. It had been all too easy to sneak in. While disguised as a human, he took great care of his appearance—his jet black hair combed neatly back, his perfectly tailored black suit pressed, his pair of rimless glasses spotless. This look was inline with the humans in the floors above, who were dressed in business formal while hunched over computers in cubicles, unaware to what was happening in the basement. Meanwhile, he had just forced access into ServTech's mainframe from the desktop tucked behind the servers and rows of storage cabinets.
He had been alone in he room for five minutes. His fingers flew over the keyboard as green lines of text scrawled across the screen. A minute more, and he would be finished—
"A human?"
The voice had a harsh metallic ring to it. Elec Man looked over his shoulder.
A crudely crafted machine was watching him from the stairs. It was a 'scrapper' style robot—or a robot built by illegally assembling scrap parts from other robots into one, giving it a misshapen, mismatched look. Scrappers were popular henchmen for mobsters because of their ability to be made cheaply and quickly without enlisting a proper roboticist, and because of the amount of terror their monstrous forms struck in their victims. No two looked alike, and they most often had weapons welded to their elbows in the place of forearms.
This scrapper had one arm transformed into a sharp appendage that looked something like a three foot potato peeler. The other arm was a blaster. Dark crusty stains flecked its plain heavy armor like splashes of paint. Elec Man wrinkled his nose as he turned away from the computer. It had snuck up on him. This was the occasional hazard of not having an accomplice who could have been on lookout, but Elec Man felt it more efficient to work alone.
"So you're the hacker that has been giving the Copper Lugnut Confederation so much trouble." The scrapper kicked the room's heavy steel door closed, cutting off escape, then jeered, "This will be easy!"
The scrapper charged, its potato peeler arm held before it like a revolving lance.
If he had been human, Elec Man would have become another stain on the scrapper's armor. But no matter how much the scrapper swung and stabbed at Elec Man, it could not so much as sever a thread on Elec Man's wool suit coat as Elec Man evaded as easily as a shadow.
The sadistic triumph in the scrapper's camera-like optics turned to confusion.
"What are you?" it demanded, pulling back. "You look human, and yet…"
"I'm not," Elec Man supplied curtly.
"But you can't be an android! No android looks human enough to fool a robot!"
"No android…except for a Syndicate android. You've no doubt heard of my affiliation…it's too bad you won't live long enough to warn anyone."
The scrapper drew even further back, its voice rising in anger. "You're a damn spanner?" it shouted, using the slang term other criminals called members of the Steel Crescent Syndicate with dread and loathing, for they were hated worse than even cops.
"Correct, scrap-bot." Electricity burst from Elec Man's hands in a bright flash the lit up the room. The scrapper made a horrible shriek like a microphone pointed at a speaker, before collapsing to the ground, paralyzed.
Though defeated, the scrapper was still furiously trying to compute Elec Man's existence. A sort of indignant pride seemed to have kindled in its programming, sparked by being so effortlessly taken down by another robot who had called it 'scrap-bot' (even a scrapper did not like to be called a 'scrap-bot', as it were too true) and for all his robotic abilities still looked impossibly human—a human that could shoot lethal currents of electricity from his red gloved hands and move as quickly as lightning.
"We're not…so different…" the scrapper uttered bitterly. "You may look prettier, but underneath it all…we're both built to…do our gangs' dirty work—"
Elec Man couldn't help but roll his eyes at this. "Our difference is that I was built with class and principle…both woefully underrepresented in the criminal Underground, wouldn't you agree?" he responded lazily as warm, feathery bands of electricity hummed between his fingers.
The scrapper stiffened. "P-please…I—I was just doing what I was programmed—"
Elec smiled proudly. "So am I."
He did not prolong the destruction. Scrappers were not worth capturing and reprogramming. In a blazing instant, the Thunder Beam tore through its body, melting components and frying circuits. Then the scrapper fell back onto the dirty concrete floor, acrid smelling smoke curled out from the edges of its armor.
…A human might have felt sorry for the scrapper, but Elec Man did not. In the three months since his activation, Elec Man had taken out seven scrappers, a chore like pulling weeds or squashing cockroaches, and he turned back to the computer terminal without a second thought. Once Elec Man had wreaked enough devastation within ServTech's corporate files, he tidied the crime scene, then carved the Syndicate's mark (a curved crescent) into the desk with a knife from his pocket.
As he stepped over the scrapper's fried shell on his way out, he picked up his glasses which had fallen off during the fight, and wrinkled his nose. The abhorrent robot had stepped on them, shattering the lens and crumpling the frame.
Scowling, Elec Man stuffed the broken glasses in his suit pocket. Then he left the way he came—back upstairs and straight through the front doors, right under the eyes of the robot guards who also assumed he one of the human office workers, and paid no attention—they were on the lookout for robotic threats.
Elec Man smiled to himself as he walked down the street before hailing a cab. Like many before it, the Copper Lugnut Confederation would soon fall…just another robot gang to be crushed by the Syndicate.