Chapter 33

"When someone says that they have people everywhere, you expect it to be hyperbole! Lots of people say that. Florists use that expression! It doesn't mean that they have someone working for them in the bloody room!"

— M, Quantum of Solace

All around him there was a crippling, chilling, biting darkness, the kind that one felt penetrating their bones, clawing at the back of their eyes, ripping and tearing at their sanity; it was the sort that suggested to whomever experienced it, through sheer convenience of existing, that there was something out there wanting nothing more than to kill them, and nothing they could do could change that fact or delay the inevitable. The boy heard nothing, he felt nothing, he saw nothing, each and every one of his senses was annulled by this darkness, and for all his worth he could do nothing against it, it was like an enemy that knew everything about him, all his secrets, all his techniques, all his weaknesses. It was winning.

I have to wake up. He felt something dragging at his psyche, he felt something weighing against his mind, as if his thoughts were not alone like they had always been. I cannot stay here. It seemed that, with each thought that fired through his mind, light began shooting through this dark void, appearing almost exactly the same as lightning storms viewed from orbit, brief white lances through the dense black that was the fog around him.

For everything he tried, however, the fog did not lift. He tried clenching his hands, but they did not budge, he tried moving his head, but it did not shift. Even twitching an eyelid, or inhaling quickly, nothing happened. It was as if his body was ignoring what his brain was commanding, like a machine being given commands that conflicted with a non-self-termination program.

Start slow, kids... Your bodies will be fundamentally different from what they were before. Came to his mind, echoing as if said from very far away in a massive cavern. It was less a memory, and more a warning - his unconscious mind reminding him that his body was different now, if it obeyed his commands he could very well destroy or critically injure himself without meaning to.

There was, however, a second, just as possible conclusion, that perhaps his new 'tenant' was exercising a certain amount of control over him, restricting his movements until it knew he was more able to control himself, until he re-learned how to move in his own body. How it made this determination - and, more worrying, how it was even able to restrict his movements in the first place - was beyond him, but if he began their partnership doubting it, as opposed to trusting its judgement, he would only open himself up to further weakness later on.

So, all of that in mind, he slowed his lightning-fast thoughts down to a crawl.

Start slow... He thought.

Abhorrently slowly, he inhaled, the fog lit up, the lightning storm all but telling him it was working.

Work for it, SIGMA.

He exhaled.

July 2220

"Take them alive!" Had been the words that had doomed the two and a half dozen surviving Force Recon Marines.

Miranda Lawson had been there for the entirety of the battle, and now that it was reaching its climax, she was moving in. The Marines, despite fighting valiantly, were doomed by their inferior numbers, and the two remaining SIGMAs' intrinsic ability to take command of a losing situation and turn it around. Maybe the Marines would have been able to pull off a victory if the SIGMAs hadn't been around, they were indescribably lucky they'd found themselves those alien weapons - those had certainly evened the odds, and even killed one of the SIGMAs, but had, in the end, only delayed the inevitable and gave the Rebels better arms to fight future battles with. The Marines were good, but the fact of the matter was that SIGMAs were designed to be get-out-of-jail-free cards, it was almost impossible to fight them in a fair fight and win, they were just too good - even against the 'good guys'.

Right now, Miranda was moving on a tight timeframe. The Rebels' reinforcements would be here in less than an hour, and while Miranda was willing to take her chances in the middle of a warzone with two SIGMAs focusing on capturing alive and somewhat healthy the remaining Marines, she did not want to take her chances with a base crawling with a base crawling with paranoid rebels specifically searching for people better equipped than them and hiding from them.

In and out. She told herself once again, as she reached the base's fortifications, a vast majority of which had been blasted apart by the Marines' mechs. I can do this. She inhaled deeply, and exhaled completely. Just don't think about it. Do what you were trained to do.

Without further hesitation, she broke cover and sprinted for the broken, shattered fortifications. She knew her tactical cloak wouldn't shield her from the SIGMAs' motion trackers, but there were only two of them, and none of the rebels had any, so that just meant she'd have to freeze if any of the SIGMAs came by, and if they were focused on all of the marines, she would be fine. She climbed over the large bits of rubble, keeping her feet light so as to not disturb any of the dust and debris; she froze when she slipped and a few small pebbles fell down, but kept moving after a few seconds passed and the only activity was the firing of a few bullets in the distance. She passed over the thick wall, ignoring its innards and whatever rooms within were exposed to the outside, instead entering a building in her way through a large hole in its wall.

She entered the shattered, dark building and stepped right over a dead, blown apart corpse. It was a gory, disturbing image, seeing the dust-covered corpse, drained almost dry of its blood, with three of its four limbs blown apart, but she ignored it for now, it wasn't important to her mission. Later, she knew, she would go back to think on everything she saw, but this was what Hampton had taught her - to file it all away, to ignore it, to push it so deep into her mind that she wouldn't even register it until she was safe enough to do so.

There is a time for everything, and when you're on assignment, anything nonessential can wait. The only thing that matters is your objective.

Of course, as she crept across the body-strewn, bloody, and debris-covered grass and concrete, she made a brief connection to her time on Sparta, and wondered for a moment if John and the SIGMA II's had training similar to hers. True, her month back there had given her an otherwise impossible peek into how SIGMAs trained each other, but pretty much all she'd done back then was combat training and physical training, she didn't know how the Ones desensitized the Twos to violence.

The invisible woman shook her head, those thoughts weren't appropriate on the mission grounds, especially after she had just finished reminding herself of Hampton's 'time and place' ideology. Right now, she had her work, and her work was to get into the cloning bay, steal every byte of data they had, and then destroy everything else. To that end, she had what McGraw described as a 'micro-nuke', it only had in it one and one half of a kiloton of force, but given that the explosive itself was barely the size of the pad of her thumb, she considered it worthy of the name. She had no idea how it did what it did, but McGraw had instructed her very clearly to 'get the eff out of dodge' when she set the timer, because this explosive had been what he'd made on accident when he had been experimenting on how to break through hardlight barriers.

She prowled over to a wall, pressed herself up to it and crouched down low as her HUD - displayed directly onto her eye thanks to a pair of contact lenses - told her a few Rebels were approaching. She waited for them to pass, they were in a hurry - one was screaming in pain as its thoroughly shredded and limp leg leaked blood and bits of gore and bone with every hop and every step. When they rounded a corner and one kicked in the door to the impromptu hospital - with the official one having been destroyed by the Marine Mechs - and they stumbled in, Miranda kept moving. The cloning building was kept in the center of the base, and it had escaped a great deal of damage in the attacks, but Miranda was working on the assumption that what she was looking for was in critical condition, and could expire at any moment, so she had to move, quickly but carefully.

Sum up my life in three words: Quickly, but carefully. She thought, as a grin passed across her phantom face.

Her journey through the rocked rebel base went by relatively smoothly from then on. A few times she had to slow down so she could avoid rebel patrols, and change paths entirely on the mere suspicion that a SIGMA could cross ways with her.

Entering the cloning facility, she hadn't really known what she would have expected. Given McGraw, and what he usually surrounded himself with, she could say she'd have expected some sort of cheesy twenty-second sci-fi laboratory, with rows and rows and rows of massive pods, which had contained within them fetuses and bodies of various stages of growth, suspended in a vat filled with green liquid as they were grown unnaturally. Instead, she simply found a small lobby - admittedly evacuated - and a path that split into three directions. To her immediate front was a large double-door, and to her left and right were two hallways, though where they led, she didn't know. She did, however, know that she didn't want to try the most direct route, as the double doors in front of her were closed, and her contact lense's various surface-penetrating vision modes informed her that there were people on the other side of them, and she knew they would instantly be alerted to her presence if the doors suddenly opened by themselves.

Though… Thought the operative, as she slowly retreated to a corner of the room to think for a moment. There is something to be said about the direct route not being the one counter-spies would be prepared to defend as well as the indirect ones. Though thinking about every possible 'what-if' was an exercise in futility, it was impossible to predict everything and act accordingly, so she instead decided she would go with the smartest of the options she had available.

Miranda flipped a mental coin, and it landed on Heads, dictating her decision to move to the right. The hallway itself was fairly nondescript, with a rough wooden floor and bare, unpainted plaster walls. The only notable detail being a thin layer of the dust and debris covering the floor from how much the building had been shaking thanks to the fighting outside. She prowled down the hallway, keeping to one side or the other and never venturing down the middle like an untrained fool. She kept her feet light and her steps lighter, Hampton had told her that some of the greatest Drell assassins were able to walk across snow, in full armor, and not leave a single trace, and while she wasn't that good, she was able to hide her presence rather well for an as-of-yet ill-experienced Operative.

After a second left turn, she found herself staring down an elevator. She didn't trust it, but the thing had been summoned - there was someone here in the building, and he was coming her way, judging by the ascending number.

That, she concluded, explains the SIGMA security this base has. The base had a massive underground presence, because the building itself wasn't that big, barely two stories tall, it wouldn't even warrant an escalator, let alone an elevator, so unless the cloning technology came bundled with hammerspace or pocket dimensions, they had to have moved down to make space.

Miranda quickly slinked over to the elevator's immediate left and flattened herself against the wall. When the elevator stopped ascending and the doors opened with a cheerful ding, she held her breath and waited for the chatting Rebel scientists to exit.

"... telling you, lady, we've got it down to an art form, now. With those memory chips Teemo gave us, we have those things done less than three weeks." The chattier, louder, more McGraw of the two said, rather brashly, as he and his female partner exited the elevator and walked down the corridors. Miranda pitied his coworker, she looked thoroughly annoyed and somewhat nervous by the man's overbearing attitude. "The Alliance won't know what hit it. We'll end the war within the year!" He all but cheered.

The woman said, softly, "but… Isn't cloning outlawed in Council territory?" She asked, "if we won, and we joined with them… We would have to obey their laws… We couldn't clone… We couldn't make AI's… We'd have to dismantle our fleets…" The way she spoke made it clear that she was here for reasons other than loyalty to the cause, but Miranda couldn't care less than to guess why.

The brash scientist waved off her comments. "Please, you don't know the Council then. All they care about is power, if it helps them get stronger, they'll let it slide. The Batarian Slave-Trade helped stimulate the Hegemony's economy, which trickled down into the Council's worlds, and they only clamped down on it after the damned Alliance kicked their asses and tried to claim the moral high-ground. They might do something about our AI's, what with the Geth and all, but everything else? Our guns, our FTL, the cyber-augments? They'll keep that stuff. Hell, maybe with all we'll be giving them, we'll be on the fast track to a seat on the Council." Said the man, as they turned the corner and their voices grew distant.

Miranda huffed silently, that man was terribly misinformed. Even if the Alliance lost the war and the Rebels joined the Council, it would be centuries before a Human sat among the Council. Such a monumental occurrence couldn't possibly happen any faster, it was asinine and naive. Regardless of her opinions, she slinked inside the elevator and hit the 'return' button - the elevator would go back to the last floor it had been called from. She figured that would be the best place to start. It took thirty seconds to go from the ground floor to the sixth basement floor, and when the doors opened, the invisible Cerberus agent furrowed her brow.

Cerberus may be unstoppable when it comes to political and economic connections… Thought the eighteen year old agent, but we are sorely lacking in the spy and intelligence department. From what she knew, there were only around sixty one spies - not including herself - as opposed to hundreds, and hundreds, and hundreds of political and economical connections.

The raven-haired agent silently padded out onto a large metallic catwalk, which overlooked exactly what she had expected to see earlier, due to this mission's association with McGraw: All along the walls, lining them, were rows upon rows of nine foot tall pods filled with a pale blue liquid, all of them were, without fail, in the process of gestating a human being. Some were empty and bone-dry, signifying they had finished their work, while others were in the process of emptying, draining out their placenta-like liquid into thin tubes connected to the walls, leaving it up to Miranda's imagination to conclude how the clones made it out of the pods on the walls. The ground floor, some ten meters below her, was what interested her - there were hundreds, perhaps even thousands of identical copies of one single man walking about, some eating out of food-paste tubes and drinking out of water bottles, others reading from implanted Smart-Watches, others simply getting used to their bodies, stretching their arms, or hopping from one foot to another.

All of the cloned men were around two meters in height, with very muscular builds. Their heads were almost completely bald, some of the older clones had a peach-fuzz covering their heads signifying the beginning growth of their hair. Miranda couldn't tell the color of their eyes, but they all had pale skin. They all wore simple uniforms, red and blue shirts and pants, with the Rebels' calling card, the gaudy flame pattern adorning them all.

With a click of her tongue, Miranda activated the cameras on her contact lenses, and took a few pictures and some short videos of the massive, cavernous room, before she silently walked along the right edge of the catwalk, towards a small protruding room with a large window that overlooked the entire room. Through the window, she had seen a great many computers, her target.

This is bad and good. Thought the newly minted agent, as she sidestepped another duo of scientists. The cloning tech works, good. It's been working for the rebels, bad. The clones seem to be healthy and stable, good. They were talking about memory chips, bad. They were talking about speed of creation, bad. Let's make an educated guess… Thought the agent as she reached the small laboratory and waited for another scientist to exit so she could slip in. They're using their SIGMAs to clone more. With an army of cheap, easily trainable, and most importantly, limitless SIGMA operatives, nothing would be impossible. An unending army of suicide super soldiers… God help the Alliance if this ever gets past the 'build the numbers' stage. She knew now, more than ever, why McGraw had given her the micro-nuke. None of these things had Titan armor - or, at least, it didn't look like they had any - meaning that none of them could tank an explosion like that.

A scientist exited the overlook lab, and before the door slid closed again, she slipped inside, about as loudly as a falling leaf in the middle of a tornado during a Krogan war. The scientists inside were all chatting, looking over their computers, jotting down notes, commenting on what they saw below or what they saw on their screens. Miranda kept as far away from them as possible, silently thanking her tactical cloak, as without it, half of the things she was doing would be completely impossible. As she passed by, she scanned over the monitors the rebel scientists were looking at. She saw, among other things, a clone getting a medical examination, a clone's head being dissected, a clone bench pressing upwards of what the monitor marked as a total of seven hundred kilos, making Miranda wonder if these SIGMAs came pre-augmented, or came out of the test tube as human as the rest of them, though both solutions presented endless questions.

Turning from the monitors and continuing deeper inside, Miranda changed her focus back to her objective. The laboratory was more spacious than it looked like from outside, about double the size of an average apartment. Miranda searched for the darkest corner in the room, which was somewhat difficult given the brightly lit environment. After she confirmed she was alone, she fumbled inside her invisible coat for a thumbdrive McGraw had given to her. It was actually an awkward fit, given the fact that she was wearing a skin-tight catsuit. There weren't any real places to put a holdout bigger than a finger, and even then the places she could holdout were somewhat obvious. The best she had other than her own assets were a few small concealed pockets, big enough to hold a micro-nuke, but not a gun or anything truly useful in a holdout situation.

Note to self: either find a way to hide a weapon in this thing, or abandon it entirely. She could understand the usefulness of a cat-suit on a stealth mission, but that argument was rendered somewhat moot when one considered the fact that both SIGMAs and N7 both conducted stealth missions in power armor.

Throwing these thoughts to the part of her mind where the other non-essential thoughts were locked, she stuck the small thumb drive into the computer, and the moment her hand left the device, it became visible once again. She reached forward and clicked 'execute' on the pop-up, and waited. A trend that had begun in the late twentieth century film industry, and had stayed consistently throughout the industry's existence was a tense window showing each and every individual file being copied onto whatever it was doing the copying, and then a status bar counting down - as slowly as dramatically possible - the process until completion. In real life, things were far less dramatic, far more clear cut, far simpler - just a single status window showing the process as it went, from zero percent to one hundred. With modern technology, even terabytes of downloads could happen in seconds, but with McGraw's personally designed program? It happened almost as fast as Miranda blinked - one moment, the Rebels still had control over their facilities and possessed all of the files linked to their various servers and hard-drives, the next, it was all Miranda's.

She swallowed through her suddenly dry throat, and reached out and grabbed the thumb drive. Hampton had said, and a few of the agents she'd met through McGraw had confirmed, that it was around now that things went bad. True, many of them said that the staple of a good agent was conducting their mission successfully and without problem, but they all also attested to the age old adage, 'the best laid plans never survive first contact with the enemy'. She stashed the small black thumbdrive inside her cat-suit and zipped it up tight. All that was left was to plant the micro-nuke.

As she retrieved it from its Tuning-Metal case, she recalled what she had been told about it. McGraw said it was designed less to kill people, and more to ensure maximum property damage. How a bomb the size of the pad of her thumb was able to do what McGraw said it could do, Miranda didn't know, but she had been exposed to him long enough to know that there were some things people were better off not knowing when it come to him. Despite a great deal evidence to the contrary, Miranda actually subscribed to the rumor that McGraw got everything - from his blueprints to his ideas - from another universe, that he had been contacted by these elseworlders when he was young, and used them to get where he was now. His 'Enter and Die' room? An interdimensional QEC he used to speak to this other dimension. It was horribly cheesy and completely impossible, but at the same time, it was McGraw, to him, impossible was a challenge he couldn't refuse.

Just peel off the surface layer… She thought, switching on her HUD so she could see what she was doing, despite her invisibility. Stick it to whatever you want dead… She pressed it to the underside of the desk she was crouched in front of, and smoothed it out. It stuck fast. Press the button… She felt around in the center of the gelatinous explosive for a small, BB-sized button, and pressed it in. It's armed, you've got six and a half minutes. RUN.

While she wouldn't run, she would definitely beat feet. In six minutes and thirty seconds, the kiloton and a half of explosives would shred the underground laboratory, and everything inside of it. If she was lucky, the surface wouldn't be too touched - she was a long way down - but everyone she'd spoken to, who had time in the field, had told her that she should obey Murphy's Law as if it were the word of God himself - what can go wrong, will go wrong.

If Jorell'Sahn wasn't suffering from broken bones, a swollen throat, several cuts and lacerations, and one or two hastily patched up bullet wounds, he would be cursing out god, the ancestors, the Terran Rebels, the deserter SIGMAs, and everything else in every language he knew. 'Take them alive' indeed, the moment the SIGMAs had taken control of the battle, everything went downhill. Something must have gone wrong with their plan, because they'd never gotten a response for their SOS from the Fleet. The officers had sent it again and again, until one of the SIGMAs had broken off from the Rebels, tracked them down, and taken them all hostage, without a single casualty, on their side or on his.

It's official, Jorell decided - I hate SIGMAs. They were an unstoppable force, and that was all well and good when they fought for you, but when they fought for the other guy? They were the worst things to walk the galaxy, they were the problem children, they were the assholes at basic training who challenged the drill instructors, they were the douchebags that would call foul on a good play, and a red card just to protect their buddies. They were the kind of people who, back during the days of the Migrant Fleet, would have caused a decompression, just so they could fix it, be known as a hero, get promoted to Captain, and maybe - if they were lucky and they spinned the story right, and enough people died before they fixed it - even get a ship named after them in their honor.

In short… Thought the Quarian, fuck SIGMA Operatives, fuck whoever got these ones to desert and defect, and fuck everything else, just because.

Jorell forced himself to a sitting position and looked around. The few dozen surviving Marines had all been corralled into the base's prison. It was dusty and unwashed from misuse, but it was big - there were twenty cells, and none of them had more than five people, that way the Marines couldn't try something through sheer weight of numbers. The place was made of bricks, reinforced with cement and concrete, and their cells had steel bars keeping them locked up tight. Without his tools - which had been stripped of him before he'd been tossed inside - neither Jorell nor any of the Marines would be going anywhere. It was dark, there were no lights or windows, and the only exit was being guarded by a Rebel who had on his hips two Painter Pistols, and had cradled in his arms a crowd-control weapon. He looked tense and angry, but aside from that, it was too dark to see anything.

Jorell sighed, and leaned back up against the wall. Few else were doing better than him, and many were doing worse. Of their two dozen, ten of them had lost limbs entirely, all of them had wounds and injuries of some sort, and a good fifty percent of them had bullet wounds or broken bones, or both, they all were alive only because the rebels had stabilized them and wanted hostages. Jorell felt his body scream and protest with each and every movement.

For my first ever deployment… I guess I didn't do half bad. Mirthlessly chuckled the Quarian Engineer, as he felt the still air shift the slightest bit on his exposed hands.

"Quarian." Came a deep, quiet, serious voice, from within the cell. Jorell turned his head over to look at the man, who wore the getup of a Marine Sniper; Jorell grunted in response. "My name is Paul. Paul Dosdon." The human said succinctly, nodding to Jorell.

Jorell swallowed, "Jorell'Sahn." A great many former Migrant-Fleet Quarians had difficulty adjusting to the First and Surname social custom of the Humans, and many of them didn't even try and just went for their given, family, ship, and crew names all in one go. When in Quarian company, many post-Migrant Fleet Quarians did the same, but when with Humans, they just stuck with their given and family names.

Dosdon nodded, "so where were you born? Do you serve on the Einstein?"

Jorell inclined his head a bit in interest, the Human had the foreknowledge to ask for Jorells' history, whereas most Humans weren't interested - or versed at all - in Quarian customs. "Nar Mindoir." He groaned, as he sat up straighter. "Vas Balboa II." Though if what his now dead squadmates had told him rang true, he'd be off that ship in three months at least, once he got some planets and some experience under his belt. Force Recon moved ships a lot more often than the regular Marines, and that made it somewhat difficult to be given a Crew name, but most Quarians, these days, assume the name of the vessel they work on at present, and on retirement, either keep their last military vessel or assume the name of the planet or space station they would live on.

Dosdon grunted, "oh. I'm an Einstein man, and you're the first Quarian I've ever met. Mind if I ask a question or two?"

Jorel blinked, "uh… This isn't the best time… Or most appropriate place."

Dosdon shrugged, "well, I figured I'd never get another chance, you know? Not but… What, fifty million of you? I've been kind of wondering what your people do for their Pilgrimage these days, given that there's no fleet to benefit from… But, I guess you're right." He nodded and looked back outside of their cell. He and Jorell were one of the unlucky ones to be thrown away last, they were the only two in their cell - but at least they weren't this one poor schmuck who had one all to his lonesome. "Serve long, Sahn?" He asked, Jorell grunted a negative. "Ever get any Superman flak about your name?" An annoyed affirmative grunt, Dosdon chuckled. "I don't get called Superman, but I got a lot of flak when I was little about my name. Paul. Did you know the last person to be named paul died in twenty-eighty? No one since has ever had the name, but my folks wanted to be different, so they looked up a name book and saw Paul." He explained, "apparently, it was a dreadfully common name back in the day. These days? Not so much. There is only one Paul in all of Alliance space, and he's a washout."

Jorell swallowed thickly, "washed out of what?" He asked, "N7? OD3's?"

Dosdon turned around and grinned, "SIGMAs." He said, so quietly that Jorell almost missed it. Jorell stared, not willing to believe it. Dosdon tapped the side of his head, "systemic augmentation rejection syndrome. I had a latent case, tests said I didn't have it, the aug-procedure said otherwise. They got as far as my eyes before they figured out that wiring me up would, best-case, kill me. Why else would I be a sniper?"

"Do you… Have a plan?" Jorell asked.

Dosdon's previous smirk darkened back to a frown. "No." He admitted, "I was trained like these guys, but when two men with the same training and similar experience go up against eachother, the guy with space-age bio-mech amps and power armor will win against the wimpy Human with eagle vision every time." He had one knee up and was resting his arm against it, the other leg slowly slid back out to full extension.

Jorell was glad that he hadn't dared to hope, but he still felt let down and disappointed. "Why bother telling me that if you can't do anything?"

"Because you don't go through the SIGMA Seven without picking up some things. Despite what you hear, those years aren't just us tearing ourselves apart to become unstoppable forces. Day one they throw your ass in the meat grinder, suicide mission against veteran SIGMAs. You pass, you get to train until the next Suicide Mission against even worse odds. You fail, that's it, you're done, no retries." Dosdon explained lowly, so their guard wouldn't hear. "I made it through all seven years, and did six actual missions with my fellow recruits, before we went under the knife. Now I have to take a pill and a shot every month or my eyes will swell up, get inflamed, get infected, go blind, and pop." He blinked his augmented eyes, which were rapidly scanning each and every nook and cranny of their holding cells, looking for anything he could use to escape.

Jorell didn't see the point to what he was saying, "what -"

"You also learn to shut the hell up and listen." He said somewhat angrily, before he tapped his ears. Jorell focused, but didn't hear anything. Dosdon sighed, "they're as frantic as we were. They're expecting the cavalry, so they're calling everything in that they can spare, planet-wide. You know what that says?" He asked, "it says that they've got something here, something they do not want us to get." He said, not giving Jorell a chance to answer.

"S… So?"

"So… We're going to be getting some SIGMAs - real ones - of our own… Real soon."

Ever so slowly, carefully, he moved. His movements consisted entirely of sitting up straight and dragging his legs off of the blood-covered, metallic operating table. These movements alone took almost everything out of him, and he slumped over, exhausted. The Commander had been right, his body was fundamentally different from what it had been, things felt faster, louder, brighter, thicker, but also lighter, slower, and colder. If he moved too quickly, his body wouldn't obey his mind, opting instead for a light spasm.

He controlled his breathing, many of his previously instinctual bodily functions had become so again, but breathing itself felt different now, it felt like he could breathe less, and still have more oxygen in his lungs than most Humans would with two lungfulls. His eyes, they too were different, he could take in almost each and every detail in his environment, down to the most minute, like the creases between the small metallic plates in his surgery room, and the less so, like the surgical scars on his body. His increased healing factor, due in part to his nanomachines and also because of his previous chemical augmentations, had made it so the scars were no longer raw and bloody, but they were still red, and were still visible, a maze of precise lines drawn all over his body, showing where the machines' tools had cut into and begun the painful process of forced mechanical evolution. Where once he would have been considered attractive the world over, now, not so much.

But He cared not for things such as physical attractiveness, what he cared for was his duty, and it was this duty that made him push himself even now, when his body was exhausted from surgery and the exertion he was putting it through. He was forcing his body to act, forcing it to move, so he could feel how it did, learn from the feeling, and replicate it. He was re-learning how to do something so basic as movement, to anyone else, to any other Human being, it may seem pitiful, but to him, it was not, because he wasn't Human.

He clenched his fist as tightly and as quickly as he could, flexing his muscles and allowing a deep scowl to cross his face as his arm began shaking.

He wasn't a Human. He wasn't even a SIGMA. He was more than the former, and better than the latter.

He was John S2-15, and he was a SIGMA II.

A/N:

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