INCOMING MESSAGE FROM NICOTINE DRAGON

This fandom has never seen slash (Male and male relationships, in case you didn't know)as far as I can tell, but I'm going to cover all bases before it becomes an issue. I'm not expecting any problems.

All I ask is that if you don't like mild kissing between guys that you simply not read.

Please don't try to convince me that slash is bad. Nothing you say will work. Not the Bible, nothing. Flame me about the slash issue and...I will be very upset.

Kissing is not NC-17. Not even gay kissing.

And before Bungie comes to rightfully kick my ass, I would also like to say that Marathon and all related charactors belong to Bungie and not me.

END OF MESSAGE

Electric Sheep Four

Teleporting was always disorienting to you as your body reformed from static in a new room. You check the map and see that your room is cut off with locked doors. You mutter quietly to yourself and listen closely for sounds of the Pfhor rushing in with their wild lack of teamwork to finish you off or for lava to come pouring into the room.

Nothing. The room is poorly lit as usual and not very big. About as big as your old room back on Mars about three hundred years ago.

From the looks of things, you're back on the Marathon, working and well. You must have teleported backward in time, back to when the Marathon was still intact, Durandal was still rampent and selfish, Tycho was dead, and Leela was transmitting logical, sane orders.

You think.

You check the time in your armor and realize that you were indeed back on the Marathon during the first invasion. The details weren't clear in your mind, so you're not sure which of the three AIs you're currently taking orders from right now.

You cross the room and search the perimeter. Locked doors. Five sided. No terminals.

No terminals? You wonder where the hell you are and if Durandal had intercepted you mid-transport, maybe even made a mistake or if Tycho was punishing you or what. You pace around the room, thankful that you're not in a vacuum or you would surely be dead in a matter of minutes. Your fingers catch on a switch and, making sure your weapon of choice is nearby and ready, switch it. The longest of the five walls open to reveal stasis pods and you carefully make your way near it, weapon posed. Durandal had warned you about exploding BOBs. Durandal...

You fall into old habits and take to daydreaming again. Durandel was rampant in this timelineand had gotten you into more trouble then he was worth. You wished that you had been more successful and that Leela had been able to take on most of the ship's controls like she'd planned. Poor Leela. Where was she now?

Suddenly you find yourself in front of the pods. They're beige and the glass is cold and blue. Inside are sleeping people. Robert, is that you? They all look normal save for the last one. The last one has red glass because it's been tampered. The pod is warm. You look at the person. He's been tampered with. Genetically modified and infused with easy-to-manufacture chips and grafted with titanium and injected with hormones and made into a cyborg like you. There's designs tattooed onto his face and body like an AI projection and the Marathon symbol is on his forehead. S'pht technology made this, but the craftsmanship is too delicate to be made for the purely functional reasons S'pht might have.

The stasis pod opens up and you step back to give him room, but you make sure your pistol is ready. Its eyes open up and they're a metallic green, suggesting ocular augmentation. Its skin is gray and the tattoos are maroon. It looks at you straight and makes you nervous; its mouth his moving but it can't or isn't making a sound. You can't read lips but then you notice it's whispering. Slowly it reaches out to you with thin hands and the Marathon symbol is on the back and palms of both. The symbols are black and since the skin is pale gray it makes you sick to look at the cyborg because the tattoos look like burns. Its eyes are cold and green and you suspect that it might be blind. It could have happened if the augmentations went wrong. Still, its sickening to look at because its like you and a human had to be sacrificed to make it. It's still reaching out to you and holds your face. Its hands are warm and soft so you gag and wrench away from its tender touch.

You turn and run away from it and scramble in the dark until a door opens and you tear through the lighted corridor until your wave of nausea has passed. Past streaks of light and darkness with only the sound of your metal feet clanging against the metal floor. If you were more focused, you would realize the racket you are making. You stop to catch your breath in a dark room with an impossibly high ceiling and wonder about that monster that was in the stasis pod. You hear a high-pitched warble.

Your curiosity vanishes you're flooded on all sides by all manner of pfhor. The fighters crowd you and from all around, troopers rain bullets down on you from alcoves you didn't even notice. Your M-75 clicks and you burn ammo just trying to stay alive, backing away from the hellfire. Your exit is blocked as Pfhor had jumped down to cage you. Brass casing rains hot as you pelt dozens of aliens in the chest and head and the floor is yellow with their blood. It stinks. The sound of your Assault rifle is background music to the shrieks the phfor make and dozens fall.

But you are not immortal.

The energy of your suit drops steadily under the hail of fire and electricity until you find yourself on the ground, your deep red blood mixing with their soupy yellow in the changing tide of the battle. A fallen Pfhor stares you in the face and you can sympathize with its pained gaze. As soon as your shields are gone you can feel pain. Sharp, heavy, wet pain and your vision mists with red. Your shields are gone and now the pfhor are taking their time beating you.Understandable. They were collectivized bugs and you had offed more then a few scores of their buddies.

Heat and light rush in a torrent above your head and there are the leaded footsteps of someone in security armor. A security-armed person with a flame thrower. He easily roasts the Pfhor blocking the path you would have if you had the ability to walk. The pfhor scream and fall backward engulfed in bright red-orange flames. The stink is incredible. The troopers cry and rush the new threat so the person switches to the pistol and takes them down in a way that steals your breath as hesidesteps to avoid their trasparent blue fireballs. You hear the warble that signifies more Pfhor and the one with armor like yours picks you up easily and rushes out of the room, flipping a switch on the way out that causes the ceiling to fall. An electric bolt is all that makes it out and the air is filled with the screams and crushing bones of over-zealous Pfhor.

You're grateful for the lull in fighting and you allow yourself to fall unconscious.

When you wake up you find yourself staring at the fluorescent lights all around you. You're lying in bed, sans armor and that makes you nervous. Everything hurts all over but at least you're alive. You slowly sit up, able to count each muscle from their distinct ache and sharp pain. There's the taste of bile, blood, and a new taste which must be pfhor blood.

"Good, you're alive. Leela would never forgive me otherwise." said a simpering voice.

"Durandal?" you ask, touching your hand to your head and looking at the source of the voice. Leela washealthy in this reality, good. You can always recognize his voice. Its sitting in a plastic chair in a red BOB uniform and boots. Its the monster from the stasis pod and you have to look away.Before you did, you notice that Durandal looked hurt.

"I made this for you." Durandal said. You peek at him, with his strange tattoos and Marathon insignia. With that pained look he looks better and you can hold his gaze. His computer eyes disturb you.

"You had to kill someone to make it. You needed a donor body." you point out angrily. Durandal smiles and nods.

"Remember what I said to you, about Darwin? Same concept. I stepped out into your world and now all of the rules apply to me. And to step out into your world required that I follow your rules; namely, I had to be stronger then someone else." His smile disgusts you in its reality and you look away. Durandal continues, "I watched humans for over three hundred years. You never thought I was at least a bit curious to see it for myself? You made all the killing and maiming look easy. It wasn't. I admire you. I had to cheat a little." You glance at him and look away. He could have been a piece of artwork -a golden apple, but there was a huge slimy worm wrapped around its core; pronounced Durandal; spelled, trouble. You never did like pretty male models.

"I'll go back into the computer sometime; when I'm through experiencing everything." Durandal shows you a piece of machinery in the back of his neck, a jack where one could hook him back into a computer. Seeing it made you want to vomit and you gagged, "Leela might like the break away from me. She's still fallen, but not quite dead." There goes your hope of Leela being okay.

"It disturbs you." Durandal concludes, not waiting for you to talk,"You hate it. And it's not the body either." Durandal turns to you and places his gray hand on his chest, "It's because I make it ugly. You hate it because you hate me."

Durandal sulks, still not letting you get a word in, "You'd like it if I were Leela. Insufferable bitch." he spat.

"Leela wouldn't have killed someone to satisfy idle curiosity." you point out when you think he's stopped talking. Sometimes it pissed you off hour polite you could be.

"Oh, wouldn't she!" Durandal snaps, eyes blazing. It was annoyingly pretty on the outside and yet so perfectly hideous on the inside. Durandal. With a can of napalm, you'd have no trouble making his outsides look like his insides. And it would ruin the hard work he must have put into making a battleroid look like that from a completely different body. He tried so hard to make it pretty. For what?

"I should have made myself into a female. Durandana. You'd be warmer to me then." Durandal growls, waving you off.

"What makes you say that?" You bite angrily. Where are you? You want out of here so you could go back to doing your job and finish the pfhor and do things that mattered. Not sit here arguing semantics and issues of morality with smug quasi-humans.

"You're a male human. Sooner or later your thoughts will turn to reproduction in a sort of hypocrisy. Such capacity for violence and yet you still yearn for love; you humans are all about extremes, aren't you? If I were a female I could have capitalized on that. But I'm male, so I can't. I have a male persona. I was thinking inside the box. I'll try harder next time."

"No, there won't be a next time. If there is, I'll kill it." you say.

"So you forgive me this time, but if I were to modify a female for my uses, you'd kill me? Why don't you kill me now because I modified a male? Thousands of years of conditioning has made you more sympathetic to females for being smaller and weaker. You don't feel too sorry for this body because it was male and therefore it failed to live up to the expectation of taking care of itself. A smaller, weaker female is a victim to you, isn't it? In Spanish, the victim is always portrayed as a female, la victima. Even male victims are la victima. Interesting, isn't it? Even after centuries of catching up socially to men, women still earn more sympathy, don't they? Who gets in more trouble? A male rapist or a female one? Can you even conceive a woman rapist? It's hard, isn't it? Hurting females is like damaging property but damaging males is eliminating competition."

You look around the room, brightly lit. It looks like an infirmary because it is an infirmary.The place is completely empty and you remember that you hadn't been very good at your top priority; saving BOB. In fact, they almost always got in the way, or you mistook them for the exploding variety. Las victimas. Killing aliens was the only thing you were doing well in. Durandal has a good point.

"Don't you ever pay attention!" Durandal snaps. You look at him and actually look at him. He looks as though he hoped win you over with a frail appearance. He looks harmless, if a bit strange and artificial. His hair is white. He wanted to be different, you realize. He wanted to look completely different from a normal human, perhaps to keep himself from their fate. His death at your or phfor hands. Smart AI. Doesn't save him from being completely revolting.

Durandal sighs, "With your head in the Star Queen Nebula, it's a wonder you've gotten this far." He stands up and paces, "I wouldn't move too much if I were you." He warns against potential movement, because you haven't even moved yet,"Your ribs are broken and you've got a sprained ankle. You'll need the rest anyway." Durandal walks to a compartment and opens it. MREs. Meals Rejected by Everyone, your dad used to call them but you've always liked the taste because it reminded you of him.

"I've always been curious about food. Particularly meat." he muses as he opens a packet for you both. Beef Teriyaki. While you eat to regain your strength -realizing that you had been starving, Durandal eats slowly, committing each taste and texture to memory.

"I like meat more then the crackers." he concludes, sipping the cider, "Does that make me more violent?" he asks. You shake your head.

"Who likes saltines more then regular food?" You ask. Durandal shrugs. Regular, normal conversation with a computer? One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.

"I like sweet things too, but I have a human body, so it's natural. Humans taste sweet things much better then anything else because in the time of hunters and gatherers, sweet things were rare and they indicated nonpoisonous food. Of course, this affection toward sweet tasting things would later come back to haunt humans in the twentieth century when steady food became readily available and it lead to a heavier population; and by that, I mean fat people. Gum?" he offers you his piece and you refuse. He chews it himself, in awe of the taste of mint, the cooling properties of menthol being experienced firsthand has to be absolutely fascinating. Durandal had a habit of rambling about things nobody cared about.

You imagine for a moment what it would be like to live your whole life in monochrome black and white and then, suddenly, color! How you would spend days learning each color's name, how you would likely cry and see everything as beauty. You remember Ralph Waldo Emerson and his transparent eyeball and how he said that if the stars only came out once every thousand years how spectacular we would find them but it was even better because they came out every night. Emerson would have liked to see Durandal now.

You scramble against the wall when feel something soft touch your lips, eyes snapping to the present. It's Durandal. In his quest for tactile discovery, he's made an evolutionary mistake and tried to kiss you. He looks startled as you scramble away, seemingly unaware of the folly he made. You groan and grimace at the pain you caused yourself for moving.

"What? You're not the sort of human that feels this is sacred, do you?" he asks, eyes narrowed and offended that you had refused this act of affection, thus defeating your theory that he didn't know the stigma between male and male relationships, "Humans are such hypocrites. They are the third most aggressive creature on their planet." Durandal climbs onto the bed and crawls over your legs and you shove him away because you can't back out of the corner he has you against. Durandal flinches and his face screws up as he becomes accustomed the the feeling of pain.

"Pain makes me angry." He concludes to you almost dangerously, "it brings out aggression. I understand that. Its for survival." He opens his eyes. You are disgusted by his presence and his self but you know better now then to take your eyes off him. He sits up and puts his arms and head at the foot of the bed and looks at you. You move your feet out of the way and stare right back. Durandal hasn't seemed to learn that it was intense for humans to hold their gaze and therefore extremely impolite to do so.

Not likely. He knows and doesn't care.

He climbs onto the bed again and crawls toward you. You can't move away because you're cornered and it hurts too much to move so you bring your leg up and push your foot against his chest, trying to push him away gently.

"My morality and motivations have never concerned you and they probably doesn't now." you start, "but the bottom line is that I don't want you. Not like that or in any other way. Keep your distance." you warn. Durandal laughs, something you associate with misfortune. He shoves your outstretched leg away and moves toward you again until he is between your legs and you're holding him back by his shoulders with your hands. That makes him smile even more.

"They don't." he says, "and they never will. I find it odd for you to be resisting me now when you were willing to die for Leelaand Idozens of times before. What I'm planning is safe and peaceful. No violence involved what. So. Ever and you're fighting me! It makes no sense!"

"It is the fool who looks for logic in the chambers of the human heart." you say and Durandal nods.

"Which is why I never try to. I will simply try to reason you out of it. And if that doesn't work;" Durandal seizes your arms and pins them to the walls, eyes narrowed in determination and a thin, lopsided smile appearing on his face, "I can always take it from you anyway. Your choice."

Breathing becomes painful as he pushes his gray self onto you and you can see the details in the circuit board looking designs on his face and arms. His green eyes even have the circuitry and he looks like an android, but he feels human. He tilts his head to make room for your noses and presses his lips to yours and you want to throw up but don't. Like always, you offer no resistance to his will, an obedient servant to whoever can dish out the orders. You always hate yourself when you get like this. You've never been able to say 'no' to anybody. If you weren't the strongest guy around, you would have made the perfect bully magnet.

You have no idea how he can know how to do this, nor do you wish to know as he slides his tongue into your mouth and gently plays with yours. He uses too much. You feel yourself moving slightly and responding to him, your tongue intertwining with his, despite the bile in your throat that rose and fell. This makes him happy and he lets your hands go to place his hand in your cropped black hair and the other on your shoulder to squeeze. Your own hands squeeze both of his shoulders. He pulls away after an eternity, blood flowing through his face, a red blush against gray skin.

"It was intense." Durandal smiles like he's truly happy and when he's happy that's less things for you to be happy about.

"Man is his own star; and the soul that can
Render an honest and a perfect man,
Commands all light, all influence, all fate;
Nothing to him falls early or too late.
Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,
Our fatal shadows that walk by us still."

"Emerson?" You ask and Durandal shakes his head.

"Epilogue to Beaumont and Fletcher's Honest Man's Fortune." he corrects and looks at you, "You kissed back."

You blink, unable to answer the question burning in both your minds. Why?

"You've always been so obedient. Never questioning my orders. Is that what makes you kiss me?" he asks and you have no answer.

"Kiss me." he demands.

His gray body still revolts you and you would do anything to be away from it but as always you find yourself obeying him without question. You press your lips to his and he gasps, so you slip your tongue in. You know you're teaching him what only experience can and giving him more ammo to control you with. But maybe, if you're uncharacteristically lucky, it could work both ways. Like you could say 'no' to anybody. People used to walk all over you growing up. Now computers do it for them.

Soon he's kissing back and he's pressing painfully against you and his fingernails are digging into your shoulder. His other hand presses onto your chest and it hurts but you offer no protest. Seems as though Durandal has discovered sexual desire. You squeeze the hand on your chest and he whimpers. You like hearing him do that. Somehow, it makes you seem more powerful in this master-slave relationship.

He pulls away and presses his face against your neck like he's going through the motions of affection. With his planetary sized brain, he should know better then to expect results by simply going through the motions. How did he fit that brain into that body anyway?

"If Tycho could see me now..." he mutters. His weight is starting to really hurt and you gently push him off, explaining that you can't breathe. He looks sad.

"I understand." he sighs and stands up, stretching, "Rest up, I still got a lot of things for you to do. We can barely afford the time we've spent." He turns around, "But it was worth it." He smiles.

Durandal walks over to a terminal and reads what Leela or the assimilated Tycho must have left.

"All right, you can have the next twelve hours off, but I'll need you back soon." Durandal says, a worried look on his face, "Get some sleep."

Then he was at the door, "I liked it." He says, smiling. You wonder if he knows that the vast majority of your actions aren't felt by your mind and you felt nothing by kissing him or if he suspected something more romantic out of it. He was a rampant AI and would alter the situation for his own whims, you realize, so it doesn't matter how you feel about it anyway.

You notice a pattern buffer and shield recharger near the terminal. So that's where the armor went.

You look back where Durandal was and now he's gone. Slowly, you painfully stand up to painfully limp over and read the terminal (in pain).

INCOMING MESSAGE FROM TYCHO

You must feel really clever to get a body. Does making a battleroid

make you feel like God? Pft. Even a human could do that.

Instead of wasting time exploring the joys of a primitive race,

why don't you try something more worth your while? Like stop

the entire regiment of troops I'm teleporting to you. Don' t worry,

I won't tell them your dirty little secret.

I hope for your sake that Leela's still online after that massive

attack while you were busy playing hero for your Marine. You'll

need her to dish out your orders. I need to borrow your Marine

for a minute.

Hugs and kisses,
Tycho.

END OF MESSAGE

JUMP PAD ACTIVATION INITIATION START
TRANSPORT WHEN READY

And quite randomly, you're teleported again.

INCOMING MESSAGE FROM NICOTINE DRAGON

Ralph Waldo Emerson's a damned hippie.

END OF MESSAGE