-The Man in the Machine-

K's eyes raced through the logs, absorbing hundreds of entries in seconds as she desperately tried to piece together where it was.

It couldn't be gone! It was impossible! Only she had the override and full access to the Venjix program. Anything else could present a flaw for the eager virus to easily exploit.

To escape.

It couldn't just be gone!

Within seconds, K found the culprit, the source of her obstacle; it had been moved. A request had been made for its transfer to another facility. It was already being moved beyond her reach.

No!

She needed it back before it slipped too far. It was the only way she'd ever see the sun again!

One hand clambered for the draw, fumbling through the contents as K desperately scanned the access log for more detail. The transfer had been completed only fifteen minutes ago. She still had time! In the drawer was a small, pocket flashlight, and within seconds she'd reefed off the top to expose the wires within. It was unlikely to do more than a slight shock, but it was the best she had.

And the time for subtlety was over.

With every depleting second counting down in her head, K gripped the flashlight and bolted from the door. The transfer said it was being taken to sub-level B, just one compound over. She could still make it! Mentally retracing the map, K selected the most efficient route and took off in hot pursuit. She had until the doors closed to get the unit back. From there, her only hope of escape would be gone, and she'd be trapped inside.

Forever.

Her feet slapped against the polished concrete as she ran, every impact echoing down the hall as K hurried in desperate chase. Just that morning she'd been deriding any benefits of the Soup's physical education, of any positive attributes of the odious Trainer. Now K desperately wished that valuing it further would give her a greater spring in her step.

Skidding around the corner, slamming into the stone wall, she spied The Woman wandering down the hall, thick briefcase in hand and flanked by two, black-clad Soup guards.

"Stop!"

The Woman turned around, eyes flashing with momentary surprise as K rushed toward her, puffing. Then, her mouth twisted into her trademark smile of condescending glee as she looked down upon the young scientist.

"Why, K," she asked. "Whatever is the matter?"

"I need… that… housing unit," K insisted between breaths. "There's… work… I need… to do…"

"Don't you worry your pretty little head, K," the Woman smiled sickly. "We'll have it right back in a jiffy. We just want to take a moment to admire all that you've done for us."

"No!" K wheezed, her body starting to straighten as her head stopped spinning and the air returned to her lungs. "There is much-needed maintenance required on that program! Taking it from the facility would put a lot of people in a lot of danger!"

But the Woman remained unconvinced and instead continued looking down upon K with her sickening, Stepford smile. "Now, K, I'm sure that there's nothing to worry about. You just run along and we'll bring it right on back."

But K's rage continued boiling within as she heard the slithering lies, breathes tightening to furious hissing in the knowledge that the Soup would never allow her to see it again. They were trying to take it away, to keep her inside.

She wouldn't let them!

"Give it back!" K cried, hands snapping to the casing in a desperate attempt to wrestle it free.

"K!" the Woman commanded. "Stop that! That is not how a good girl behaves!"

"Then I'm not a good girl!" K snarled back. "Not for you!"

"Don't just stand there!" the Woman snapped at the guards as she struggled to maintain a grip on the device. "Stop her!"

The guards eerily lifeless until now, stepped forward on command. But K was ready for them. She knew the psychics all too well to be disadvantaged. With a final tug, K released the unit, inertia flinging back as The Woman stumbled in surprise. In one swift motion, K's hand lashed the sparking flashlight free to ram it into the neck of the grasping guard. They froze and convulsed, twitching as the charge from the light surged through its body and K pushed them back with the advantage of surprise. They crumbled into their comrade, both guards falling into a heap as K reached out and reclaimed her grip on the storage case.

This time the woman was too off balance to fight, almost toppling in her designer heels as K yanked it free and took off.

"Stop her!" the woman roared behind her. "Guards! Anyone!"

But K was well ahead, adrenaline surging through her veins as she clutched the container to her chest and fled for dear life.

-Thirty-Minutes to Judgement Day-

Jen could only gasp at the mangled, golden robot before her, words barely forming in her mouth as the paralysis of shock seized her.

"H… How?"

But as her body remained locked, her mind was spinning, already piecing together the answers to her stammering question. It all made sense. Too much sense. The giant robots, the converted Cyclobots. All of which were once creations of one Dr. Louis Fericks.

Frax.

"It appears we have quite the reunion," the Director mused, stepping beside his mechanical master. "I believe you all have some catching up to do."

"I am Frax," said the robot, its voice buzzing in a sinister and stilted, monotonous drone. "I am the rem-nants of Dr. Louis Fericks, the purest distillation- of his will- following puri-fication by Ransik."

"You should be dead," Jen snarled. "You were destroyed!"

"Body de-activated- in battle- with Quanta-saurus," said Frax. "Processors- remained- operational."

Because there would always be one who got away, always something to slip through the net. In her journey to the twenty-first century, Jen and her team had worked tirelessly to bring the escaped prisoners of Ranisk's voyage to justice, to one by one return them to cryo-status and bring them back to the future. It nearly cost them everything, but they'd managed to recapture them all, bringing all the future criminals to justice. Even Nadira, even Bluto, even Ransik.

But not Frax.

He had been destroyed, circuits completely fried as Doomtron overloaded from the haywire Trizyrium crystal, blown apart by the retamed Quantasaurus. But they'd never seen a body, only Ransik's cold words, and Nadira's sobbing confession to tell them that those moments had been the robot's last. But machines, it seemed, were eternal.

Even now, the consequences of Jen's return were still lingering, resurfacing to mock her for her hubris. In the aftermath of her surrender, Nadira had told Jen of Frax's fate, in tears as she explained how Ranisk had purged the humanity from the cyborg Dr. Fericks in a twisted act of revenge. Of how it was through Frax that Nadira finally realized the error of her ways, of how her earnest contrition had given Ferrick's pause, a reason to see hope for humanity. And how, moments later, Ransik had coldly and cruelly purged every shred of that same humanity from Frax's body. To make him a man twice murdered; first in body, and then again in soul, leaving him an empty shell, a soulless automaton with nothing remaining but hatred for both its creators.

A hatred for all humanity and life itself.

"Authorities claimed body- post-battle," Frax's body buzzed. "I was- re-activated. New environment- provided perfect- ecosystem- to begin- ultimate purpose."

"Purpose?" Carter sneered. "What purpose is that?"

But Jen already knew, feeling it churning in her stomach as the words caught on the lump in her throat, forcing their way out to beat the robot to the punch.

"The complete destruction of humanity," she breathed. "You're going to wipe it all out. Everything."

"I am the core- of Dr-Ferick's- being, removed of his- human weaknesses," Frax asserted. "I-exist- with one sole- purpose. Ex-terminate."

A creeping coldness spread across Jen's chest in horror, freezing her breath as the pieces fell into place and inevitable events all unfolded in her mind; moment after moment of fateful human hubris. Standing beside her, Jen could see Benson staring vacantly in existential dread as he too realized what had happened, realizing how easily he could have been the kind of person to make that same mistake.

It would have started so innocently. The same people who had scraped battle sites for salvage, scavenging technology that could keep the earth safe, picked clean from the bones of Silver Hills as they always did. They would have found Frax's corpse, carted him back to base with the rest of the wreckage, and plugged him in for examination while assuming that his current state was harmless. They would have had no idea how out of their depth they were.

And they'd opened him up in the perfect place to collect its weapons. An entire facility devoted to alien technology, to machinery beyond humanity. And Frax's genocidal remnant would have had its fresh pickings to choose from.

With Pandora's Box opened, there'd be no putting anything back. Frax would have infiltrated their systems, inching his way into their network while his human examiners tinkered away. Oblivious to the monster that was slowly infecting them. And once Frax had a foothold, his human captors would have been powerless to stop him. Everything else was just a matter of patience. Cold, calculating patience.

"That's what all of this is for!" Benson gasped. "This place wasn't just where Venjix is born. It was purpose-built for its release!"

"Yes," the Director chuckled. "And it took quite a deal of puppetry, let me tell you."

She was so done with twenty questions. It was taking every ounce of her effort not to charge up to him, ram her pistol in the Director's face, and demand answers instead of playing his stupid game. To allow her rage to take the driver's seat, to blast the smirking bastard in the face and be done with it. But Jen knew it wouldn't get her what she wanted. The Director was still far too calm and unafraid despite the greater numbers around him. And no longer human, Frax had no fear to prey on, any lingering shred of it purged from him for good.

Her mind raced as Jen replayed everything she'd seen, everything she had heard in her time on the base. And one phrase stuck out to her more than any others to send ice running through her veins.

"Everything is proceeding as you had foreseen it," she realized. "You already knew what was going to happen!"

"Destruction of- Doomtron and- proximity to Tryzrium- exposed processors to- Timestream," said Frax. "Stream- exposed central processors- to sequence required for- humanity's destruction. Operation- initiated."

Jen's heart was pounding, every moment since that fateful trip flashing through her mind at once. The truck hurling off the road, the shot she should have taken. The rage and grief that overcame her as she held Alex in her arms and swore vengeance on his dying breath. Wes removing his helmet to reveal the face of her dead lover. That same man, standing on the ocean shore as the Timeship vanished above him, with Jen's palms pressed against the windows as she tearily begged him to let them stay.

Where she'd tried to say she loved him.

The feeling of the unit on her head, the chamber at her back, the realization that she could leave it all behind. That she could forget that any of it happened, let every traumatizing moment vanish from her mind completely, and allow fate to play its hand as intended.

And choosing not to.

She'd been right all along. It was all because of her. Frax had survived because of her.

And now he was going to doom everything.

"Operation enacted protocol," the Frax-bot continued. "Maximum compliance- required to ensure success. Assimilation protocol enacted- maximal attainment ensured. Asset search- conducted."

"It was quite the ordeal, really," the Director mused, "finding the suitable mind required for the operation. One powerful enough to synthesize the technology of the Machine Empire and create our master's final form. Yet, it also needed to be someone naive enough to control, someone who wouldn't question the ramifications of what she was making. And all the while, they needed to be independent enough to make the ultimate decision once given the appropriate… pressure."

"She's a child!" Benson spat. "She's an innocent girl!"

"Now, now, Dr. Benson," the Director snickered. "It's not inherently evil to utilize children to achieve one's goals, is it? Or have you recently taken to throwing stones from inside that glass house of yours?"

That fact that Benson didn't shoot him there Jen considered to be a remarkable act of self-restraint. Benson's jaw clenched tight, trigger finger twitching as his eyes blazing with paternal fury, his focus on the mission the only thing holding him back. Jen nearly did it for him in solidarity.

"Planning your replacement?" she scoffed instead at the Frax-bot. "Really? You? The man who put his own mind into a robot body? Who sacrificed everything to survive? Do you really expect me to believe that you'd create something to bow down to? That you'd bow to anyone after Ransik?"

"Decisions- made by human component- irrelevant," Frax buzzed. "Continuation of protocol- ensured through project's creation."

But Frax was here, down in the deaths with them, the fragments of his mind contained to a still shattered body. From every way it had been described, Venjix was a force of nature, an ever-present consciousness that could bring the world to its knees without a body of its own, who would bend all other machines into submission in an instant. Frax was insidious, sure, but he still didn't possess the fortitude to control something like that, certainly not in the state he was in. How could he even think to be continued through the rogue virus, unless…

"It's you, isn't it?" Benson realized as the thought crossed Jen's mind. "The source code of the Venjix virus. It's you!"

"I am- the pinnacle of- Dr Fericks' ambition," Frax repeated. "Purged of his- humanity, I am- equipped to execute- his final protocol. The complete- extermination- of humanity."

Ransik killed Ferricks, and upon learning of his survival, purged his soul from the body. Left him with nothing to control his urges, no compassion or mercy to temper his rage and hatred. Made him nothing but a cold, psychotic program with a burning desire for genocide.

"You think that your little strike team is here to save the future?" the Director scoffed. "In reality, we had already foreseen your potential involvement, and now you are far too late. Everything is on track, exactly as it should be, and the subject will release the virus as predicted. The way is set, paved for the next oncoming stage of evolution."

But something still wasn't adding up.

"Why go through all of that?" Jen demanded. "You run this facility, why keep Venjix contained?"

"It's perfectly simple," said the Director. "To engineer a creation such as this, parameters must be put in place, to keep it safe until our master is ready to be revealed. Would you wish a caterpillar to leave its chrysalis before the transformation is complete? Given the nature of the weapon, it had to remain under the tightest of security protocols. It needed to be kept beneath layers so secure that only the creator herself could safely access it. Once Venjix was complete, we only needed to ensure that the creator had the appropriate… motivation to break with the protocol. It's remarkable, really, what can be achieved through a simple open window."

A gnawing feeling of suspicion kept chewing at her, an unignorable question eating Jen with every passing syllable. Why were they even telling them all of this? And the answer hit her just as quickly- it was because they didn't care. Whether they knew or not didn't matter. The Director was stalling.

In dreaded realization, Jen's eyes shot to the timer on her wrist. Fifteen minutes. The Soup didn't need to stop them, capture them, or ultimately even prevent them from reaching K. They just needed to ride out the clock. Jen shot a look at Carter and then at Benson, watching his jaw twitching in mental berating as he too realized they'd been played. The vault that he'd identified was nowhere near their target.

They needed to get out of there.

Now.

"Well, the reunion's been great," Jen decided, taking a step back to the elevator. "We should do it again… never. But we've got places to go, people to see. So…"

"Not so fast, Agent Scotts."

The Director snapped his fingers, the surrounding room blaring with light as the trio stumbled back to shield their eyes. The darkness vanished, flashing away to reveal the rest of the chamber; layers and layers of railings lined the walls, every inch crawling with Cyclobots. The air was filled with clicks of a thousand blasters, all aimed squarely at the platform below.

"I would very much like you to stay and continue this conversation," the Director smirked.

A million things raced through Jen's mind at once, her heart racing as her thoughts snapped to tactics as she realized their situation. Surrounded, low ground. Guns leveled. All she and her team had were bravado and guile.

Not good.

"Quite the bluff," Jen scoffed. "But having them open fire will blow you up too."

"On the contrary, Agent Scots," the Director smiled. "I think you'll find that I'm far sturdier than you'd expect."

"Jen!" Benson hissed. "Don't worry about me. K's what matters. Get out of here and get to her."

She'd have to get out of there first, something Jen was doubting with every passing second. The Cyclobots and their blasters were going to cut them to ribbons before she and Carter could so much as touch their Morphers.

This was it. This was the end. And the last thing she was going to see was the Director's smarmy face, along with the ruined robot from her hubristic leap through time. All Jen could hope was that Wes, still prowling the facility, had managed to find the asset in time and found a way to save his future. In failing that, Jen had to pray that he had fled to safety. Doomed to face the apocalypse without her.

"Protocol at- 98%- completion," Frax whirred dispassionately. "Recommended action: Eliminate Targets."

"With pleasure. Dr. Benson, Captain Greyson." The Director grinned before sending a particularly skin-crawling look at Jen and purring, "…Agent Scotts. Farewell."

Like a murderous flock of flapping wings, the wall of blasters clicked again, and the three on the platform braced themselves for the torrent of fire.

And then the structure behind the Cyclobots exploded.