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| Scene Title | Learn To Survive, Part IV |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | Escaping the collapse of a simulation was only the beginning. Now the fight for survival begins. |
| Date | July 11, 2021 |
“No. They’re alive.”
Whirring.
“Someone falsified the system report. No, Sir, I have no idea. They were marked for incineration when we arrived, but I’m taking them into custody now.”
A rough voice
“I have the two you asked for, but I also grabbed Miller and the Milos girl.”
accompanied by the whirring of electro-mechanical servos and motors. Pain, nausea, and disorientation are all Zachery Miller’s world consists of beyond these muffled sounds.
“Something’s going on here and these corporate fucks don’t have a clue. Fuck ‘em.”
Nausea.
“We’re one floor down from evac—one sec. Did he just move?”
Choking.
Zachery Miller’s world explodes in a torrent of vomit as he rolls onto his side within a highly-salinated suspension bath, retching into the syrupy saline solution. His hands reflexively paw at a mask over his mouth, disgorging a feeding tube along with it. Something heavy covers his head, obscures his vision, panicky fingers find purchase at a clasp.
“What the fuck?!”
Versatile Shipping Czechia
Secure Facility Level
Prague
Czechia
Gallons of artificial cerebro-spinal fluid pour out of an opened drain on the side of a medical bed. The suspension bath’s emergency drain flash-floods the concrete hall and disgorges Zachery Miller like a newborn calf from a trembling deer onto the cold, stone floor. Steam rises off of his body and the helmet that was once secure to his head falls forward and off, revealing the wheeled bed and life support system he was detained within and the very angry, heavily-armed men standing bewildered around it.
The meaty, block-headed silhouette of Jakob Tafero is unfamiliar to Zachery, but the handgun the size of a truck that’s pointed at him is a universal language. There’s two more private military types on either side of the bed Zachery released himself from, and a spool of cables connected to the helmet he was wearing trailing up into the bed like a severed umbilical cord.
“Check the others!” Tafero howls, jerking his head to a trail of three other matching beds being wheeled down the same corridor behind them. These ones are being moved by sleek, white robots with a white and red cross symbol on their bodies.
Fluorescent lights overhead shine too-bright and too-real for this to be the simulation.
Fuck.
Zachery writhes, disorientation still weighing heavy on his brain and body both as he twists himself wetly onto his back. Objective one - air. He focuses on his first few sudden breaths, every one of them raw and ragged from the tube and presumed disuse, but at least now his own. Reaching both of his hands slowly to the left side of his face comes next, because - why is half of his world missing? Then, he stops, realization dawning.
… Fuck: The Sequel.
He turns his head, grimacing at the unfamiliar pressure of subdermal anchors in his scalp pushing against the hard floor as the gun shifts from the blind spot of his missing left eye into proper bleary-eyed view, and then the rest of Jakob with it. Okay. That's fine.
"I'm-" Zachery struggles a half-swallowed back word out, the grimace warping into a hateful sneer as he puts all of his strength into pushing himself onto his feet one staggered motion at a time. He looks directly into Jakob's face as he finishes his sentence. "Not fucking dying here."
“Sure thing.” Tafero mutters, glancing at the others as they move to follow his orders. “You just stay fucking put right there.” The bore of that handgun’s barrel is absurd, firing it would snap his fucking wrist. There’s no way he’d pull the trigger. Who would even design a handgun like that?
The two other men wearing AEGIS armor and fatigues start checking the other beds. Before they can reach them, two people start violently thrashing and moving. One of them is Kimiko Nakamura, who jolts upright choking and screaming, hauling the length of intubation out of her throat. She barely has time to lift the visor of her helmet up before she has a rifle trained on her.
«Warning. Hippocratic heuristics prevent this unit from participating in violence against patients.» The medical robot stresses, pivoting to look at the soldier raising an assault rifle at Kimiko.
“Shut the fuck up.” The other soldier says, moving to Gabriella’s bedside, watching her stirring. “Fuck, they’re all waking up. What do we do?!”
Gabriella’s world is thrust from dream into nightmare as she submerges herself deeper into the saline bath she’s suspended in, then rises up and realizes her throat is obstructed by a feeding tube. Panic and reflex takes hold as she removes the device, straining against the revulsion, retching into the silvery syrup bath, her world still blinded by the heavy, wired helmet strapped to her head. But she can hear shouting. Angry shouting.
“Sir!”
Tafero looks away from Zachery, staring at the other beds. “Nobody fucking move!” He shouts to those just waking up, panicking. “Everybody stay where the fuck you are!”
Before removing the blinding mask, Gabriella scrambles, long legs kicking to try to find their way out of the pod but she lacks coordination and room to make it out. Finally after a couple of breaths she manages to bring her hands up to the visor to fumble at the helmet, fingers finally catching on the visor so that she can see.
Her face is tear stained even before she’s had time to assess what’s happening around her. Gone is any of the bravado Gabby’s exhibited in the simulation; she looks around, wild-eyed at the robots and soldiers that look like robots.
Her mouth gapes like a fish for a moment, and then she simply opens her mouth and screams.
There's barely time to process what's happening, much less to process what might make a wise decision. Zachery's focus on Tafero holds with a twitch of a leg to make sure he's got solid footing in his weird, unfamiliar silvery getup.
The scream makes as good of a cue as any, and with Tafero looking away, Zachery fails to care about wise and fucking launches himself at his impromptu guard with untrained and furious abandon, aiming to take that fucker down with him. Or at the very least to grapple-turn him in a direction that might make the others think twice about shooting the both of them.
Plus, Tafero's gun might be a badly designed gun, but it would make a fucking great bludgeoning weapon.
Gabby’s scream is lost under the deafening blast of Wilby—Tafero’s ill-gotten firearm—going off in the scuffle. Tafero smacks himself in the head with the gun from having a poor form while wrestling with it. He’s down on his back before he realizes what’s happened and that the hand cannon he’d been wielding is now in the hands of one of the zoo animals he was here to retrieve.
As Zachery raises the gun as a cudgel, Tafero grips Zachery’s chest rather than raise his hands defensively. When Zachery smashes Tafero in the head, all of the pain of that injury hits Zachery upside the head like a baseball bat and he jerks to the side as if he had somehow struck himself. Tafero is the one bleeding, but he doesn’t seem to feel the wound that has half of his face slathered in his own blood.
“HANDS! HANDS!” One of the other soldiers shouts at Gabby, holding her at gunpoint. “If you move I will shoot you!” He barks at the top of his lungs. The other security contractor is pivoting toward Zachery, trying to get a clear shot on him where Tafero isn’t also going to get perforated. He too is shouting guttural commands to Zachery, all while the medical robot repeats its insistence that it cannot cause harm due to Hippocratic heuristics.
Then, suddenly, the robot goes silent. The silence should be as alarming as the gunshot, but the significance is lost on all but the one person waking up in their fluid suspension.
Asi Tetsuyama writhes within her tank, not only from the physical sensation of a sensory-deprivation suspension and the tube down her throat and mask covering her eyes, but from the chaotic dissonance screaming in her mind. She is not negated. Her senses unfold beyond the tank like the arms of an octopus, limbs that she had forgotten in the simulation feel so much more real here.
She can sense every device, every radio, every—robot.
But she’s not touching any of the robots. She’s suspended in a tank of fluid. But she can sense the medical readouts. She can—
—she can see through the robots' optical sensors.
She’s untethered.
She’s gone wireless.
The physical world is a blur, and it can stay that way a while longer. As soon as she realizes she has the control she does, there's no need to make herself further vulnerable just yet. The robot standing next to her tank turns its head after lapsing into silence and turns to observe the soldier threatening Gabby.
With one of its hands designed to close with enough force to hold and move heavy medical equipment, it lifts its arms to grab the back of his exposed neck, hands pincering around his throat and squeezing in tandem with a twitch of Asi's fingers where she lies in her tank.
Her peace with the darkness is temporary, though. Her attention shifts to the pod behind hers, to Kimiko. She develops a keen interest in its current reading, all while the robot tasked with moving Zachery's bed lets go of its charge and turns to walk toward the soldier trying to interrupt the wrestling match over Tafero's gun. Asi's eyes twitch back and forth in the dark, issuing orders and pulling in info on Kimiko at the same time.
Come on, she wants to nudge her. Asi hesitates on diving in any deeper, but knows what she knows– that Kimiko had been shaping up to be the last of them out of the simulation.
Emitting a small squeak, Gabby lifts both hands to follow the soldier’s orders. Zachery and Tafero’s scrimmage of sorts has her cowering. Her green eyes narrow angrily on the soldier threatening to shoot her.
“And what do you think it is I am going to do, splash you to death?” she snaps in the newly-rediscovered Russian accent, though it’s far raspier than it had been in Optica, hoarse and raw from the tube and now the screaming.
“Idiot man. Help me out of this soup.” The last is said with all the regality of an aristocrat, complete with a head toss.
On the somewhat more feral drenched zoo animal flipside, confusion strikes the now half-deaf Zachery as hard as the unexpected sensations do, bewilderment setting his jaw as he grimaces with redirected pain. But when a quick, mid-scuffle and monocular glance to the side to see who hit him finds no one standing close enough, he turns his attention back to Tafero.
Who is bloodied.
That's deemed enough of a reason to continue. "Fun," is the one word that scrapes itself humourlessly out of Zachery's throat before he flips the gun of ungodly proportions around in his hands, crashing the grip down toward Tafero's throat as hard as possible.
Zachery and Tafero recoil from the blow like mirror images.Tafero from the force the kinetic impact and Zachery from the pain extended by Tafero’s ability.
In that same moment there is a sickening snap of bones and a crunch of cartilage, not from Tafero but the unfortunate security professional who had his neck pinched by a medical robot. The guard cannot help Gabby out of the tank, whether he wanted to or not, as he lets out a strangled gurgle. His legs give way and he hangs like a boneless chicken in the robot’s grip.
Kimiko, sitting up and still gagging from having removed her breathing tube, turns to look at the sound of gunfire with a weary half-waking confusion. Asi can see that her vitals are reading normal, though elevated heart rate is expected given the stressors of the situation. What Asi notices is the odd rhythm to her accelerated heartbeat, moving in a wave. Calm, panic, calm, panic. Like she’s half here and half somewhere else. Kimiko turns, looking down into the protoplasmic soup she’s sitting in, eyes half-focused. She is missing both of her prosthetics; her right arm just above the elbow, and her right leg just below the knee.
Another robot, having left the side of Kimiko’s medical bed, rapidly intervenes on the other security officer, plowing into him at a steady jog. The soldier fires blind, bullets pock-marking the floor and ricocheting across the hall. The security officer yelps in confusion as he topples to the floor, turning to find the robot continuing to bear down on him.
CAUTION: PERSON IN HAZARD
Asi disregards the warning in the robot’s field of vision as it tramples the security officer, breaking his right leg in three places. The officer’s scream pierces the corridor as loudly as the gunfire.
Tafero, gripping at his throat, braces himself against the still-wet side of Zachery’s bed, ears ringing from the sound of the gunfire. His eyes burn with the wild, unpredictable fury of a drunk in a barfight. Self-preservation kicks back behind raw, animalistic rage as he rushes Zachery in a tackle.
Instinct has Zachery change his stance, but a floor covered in cerebro-spinal fluid means he still falls down onto his back before he knows it, very nearly releasing his grip on the gun as he throws his arms up in defense.
There is so much going on as he's scrambling to keep any sort of frantic upper hand in the scuffle. Tafero's rage, the pain that isn't his own but feels exactly like it should be, the gunfire still echoing in his ears, two lives fighting for territory in his head. But also… familiar sensations flooding back. Nervous systems not his own on fire, other people's panicked actions pinging uniquely into his brain.
It might serve to distract, if it didn't in some way feel like home.
He is hit in the face, once, then twice — but the third hit does not connect, instead swinging wide. Blood pulses, suddenly streaking down onto Zachery from where Tafero was bludgeoned with the gun of ridiculous proportions earlier. Tafero's rage warps into confusion, then writhing, clawing agony, as blood begins to seep from his gargling mouth, eyes, and skin.
”I am not dying here.” Zachery repeats, his voice colder now. ”But you are.” Without taking his eye off of Tafero's face for long, he takes his chance to grip the gun properly while still on his back, and lets the floor take care of the kickback as he fires it directly into Tafero's face, sending both another cacophony and a splatter of singed brain matter, skull fragments and blood into the rest of the corridor's walls and ceiling.
Asi might be properly horrified by that if she were paying enough attention. But no– she has a broken neck in one hand, broken leg under one foot, and an eye separately on Kimiko's fluctuating status. She's not entirely here yet. That's not good.
The robot holding onto the soldier whose neck is snapped simply lets him go and offers its hand out to Gabriella, intent on helping the princess up and out of her pod.
The robot standing over the trampled soldier turns and kicks the dropped gun from his hand down the line, the rifle skittering to a stop by Asi's pod.
The robot steering Kimiko's pod turns to look down at her, and speaks in something that's its own voice and yet not. "中村さん," it commands her attention. "早くこの世界へ帰りなさい。打ち抜けて。1" Asi diverts her attention briefly back to the fluctuating vitals before robot pronounces, "危険です。"
That other world's a danger just as much as this one, but they'll reach better footing on this one soon. They're fighting like hell for it at least. In the black inside her tank, fighting the discomfort of knowing there's something shoved down her throat, she blooms part of her attention out once more, hoping to find cameras and the networks they speak with. Which is the safest direction to send them all from here? And where exactly were they?
Each horrifying sight evokes another startled scream from Gabriella, though they’ve grown shorter at least, little bleats of dismay as she looks from the guard beside her to Zachery to Tafero, to the robots taking out the security officers. Her eyes widen when the robot offers its hand. It seems like it’s on their side, but Gabriella is a woman who’s learned that you can’t trust much in this world.
Wide eyes trained on her would-be assistance, she murmurs, “No thank you,” and watches it carefully as she grips the side of the pod to clamor out on her own. At least having seen Zachery slip, she’s more careful to avoid the same, but stands for a moment like Bambi trying to ice skate.
“This is you?” she asks Asi, with a nod to the obedient robot, and then inches with small, careful steps over to Asi’s pod to pick up the kicked-away gun. “I think we’ve made a terrible mistake. Too late to go back?" It might actually be a joke.
"OPTICA is collapsing, or I'd tell you go right ahead," the robotic frame shadowing Gabriella's steps answers. Asi's sense of humor is likewise dry enough it's hard to read, especially through the filter of the machine. "But I'm sure the incinerator they were about to feed us into is still a valid option ahead, if you're dead set on it."
There is a background scream emitting from the soldier pinned by his broken leg under the medical robot. An anguished and wild animal scream punctuated by the occasional moment of panicked silence, then vocalized agony once more. Amid that screaming, Kimiko Nakamura’s eyes open within the fluid bed of her pod and she bursts to the surface, thrashing against cables connected to her suit and the tube down her throat. As the others did, she uses one hand to yank the tube out and retch over the side of her pod, gasping for breath.
Kimiko reaches out to put her other hand on the arm of her pod, only to wave a scarred stump in the air while a limb she can still feel simply does not exist. The old injuries inflicted on her by Adam Monroe crystalize a place and time in Kimiko’s mind, and no one will see the tears she sheds for the memory of her family in the simulation, for a daughter, for a husband, for a—
“Hiro.” Kimiko whispers while a line of saliva dangles from her mouth. She remembers herself, the moment in time she inhabits, and takes a shaky look at her surroundings. Asi can see her half disconnected from the monitor and no longer giving accurate vitals. A visual assessment pops up on the medical robot’s HUD for her:
PATIENT IN DISTRESS
For the moment, there is no other shoe to drop. And as the screams of the sole surviving soldier winds down to a whimpering sob, those who escaped the simulation are able to take in the flickering fluorescent-lit surroundings. A concrete hall ending at metal, hydraulic double doors where the soldiers were taking them and a winding corner the way they’d come from.
Still on the floor amidst the chaos, Zachery takes a moment to draw a few very confounded looking breaths. While waiting for the ringing in his ears to be anything but deafening, he reaches a hand up to his face to thumb some blood off of his cheek, and then to feel for what's wrong with his left eye — only to be reminded that it isn't there. Right. Right.
He grapples the massive gun he's still holding into an upright position to leverage himself off the floor, elbowing Tafero's dead weight off of him in the process. Then, looking around at the soldiers and at Kimiko, he processes what little he can, and stands taller thanks to a forced confidence borrowed from a version of him he no longer fully embodies.
"We can't afford to wait like this," he promptly decides, his voice steady and cold. Shooting both Asi and Gabriella a severe look, he begins to move in the opposite direction of where the soldiers were pushing them, gait stiff with disuse but determined. "We have to find the others. Take her or leave her."
Once everything appears to have died down for the moment, it's time for Asi to finally face the discomfort ahead: knowing that this pod is not, ultimately, an effective place for her to remain. In the dark of the medical pod, her expression screws up sight unseen, and she breathes out as long and patiently as she can, hoping to expel the feeding tube once the exhale is done and she's as calm as she can make herself. Best intentions, and all that.
The pod unlatches, and she sits up into it, pushing it aside with one arm while she begins to pull on the tube down her throat with the other. Best intentions in the moment mean she's still gagging once she's freed and pushes the helmet off her head, and best efforts mean she's not able to free herself on her first pass. Despite the bodysuit slick to her form, lined with plugs that activate tiny subdermal nodes to have kept their bodies from atrophying— at least greatly— this is still the first time her muscles have been moving in time unknown. Light burns in her eyes, and she fights against the feeling of comparative powerlessness she has now against all the potential she contained within her inside the simulation. She grits her teeth, reminds herself that was still the same ability she has now. It's a tough sell, given that fifteen minutes ago she would develop enhanced strength if she grew so much as frustrated.
"We all," she chokes out as she tries to pull herself in order— as one of the medical bots comes to help her out of her pod. "We all go together. We use her pod as a— wheelchair." For Kimiko, at least, but not for her.
Asi nearly slips on the ground when her feet find it, and she holds onto the robot hand supporting her with a scrambled swear in her native tongue to keep herself steady. She looks up to Gabby as she becomes more stable on her feet, giving her a small but strong nod before placing a hand at her elbow in a gesture of support, togetherness. They'd all go together. She then goes back in the direction Zachery leaves with steps fawnlike that grow surer with each determined pair completed, toward the body he leaves dead and pooling on the ground.
The technopath crouches by Tafero's feet, wiping her wetted hands along his pantleg before she digs her hand into his pocket, pulling out the phone that's been singing to her — the one he'd been talking into just before all hell broke loose. She pries it free and comes back to her feet, turning it over in her hand while her eyes glow unnaturally bright. "Who were you talking to, asshole?" she murmurs to herself, looking through the phone's registry, contacts, all while peering out the various eyes of the systems nearby.
As she makes her way back to the others, she makes momentary eye contact with a security camera hanging from the ceiling as she passes under it. With a blur of static entering its vision, a piece of her senses leave her and wind their way back through the network seeking the heart of the system it's plugged into and the eyesight it would give her into what's happening elsewhere.
"The medics are coming with — bodyguards. Wheelchair pushers." Potentially also serving as medics, though that's less comforting to say. Asi smears the back of her hand holding the phone across her mouth and nose before she leans down to pick up one of the dropped guns without breaking stride. "Stay close, listen, and we're out of here before you know it."
Holding the gun seems to put Gabriella a little bit at ease, but her eyes are still wide as she looks from one overwhelming stimulus to another. “A simple yes would do fine, robot Asi,” she says with a sniff and a toss of her head.
“Agree,” she says to Zachery as he suggests they move, and she nods again when Asi says to use the pod as a gurney, heading to Kimiko to begin the pushing, awkwardly holding on to the gun and the pod at the same time.
She stares at Kimiko, and her green eyes glimmer with tears as she realizes it’s all the grief of this world that have stricken the woman at once.
She swallows, hard, and murmurs in that newly Russian accent, “My power, it is not useful to us. I dream.” She gestures to her head. “I remember now. I could not do that before. I was …I was not one of you, before. I was…”
Clearing her throat, she narrows her eyes to focus on what’s ahead. “I was stupid. Let’s go.”
Meanwhile
Guiana Space Centre
Kourou, French Guiana
France
The massive dish of an ESTRACK antenna pivots slowly, seeking something in the sky. Parked on the side of the road near the dish a black Citroen EV stands out against a field of greenery and wild yellow flowers. Its driver paces up and down the shoulder beside the car, cell phone cradled to his ear.
«“No, he cut off mid-sentence.”» A well-dressed man says in French. «“I already called Boissard and Davignon, they haven’t heard anything.”» He wipes sweat from his forehead, then glances briefly to the dish as he listens to a voice on the other end of the line. «“I know.”» He says with a tremor in his voice. «“I know.”» Again. Agitated this time. But also afraid.
«“What do you want me to do?”» The well-dressed man finally asks. He sighs and deflates at the answer. «“And if he doesn’t make contact again? Boissard’s already convinced Tafero got caught up in the liquidation. I’d be shocked if he isn’t in the wind already. And Davignon—”» The voice on the other end cuts him off. «“Alright.”»
A moment of uneasy silence hangs on the roadside.
«“What if the liquidation fails?”»
A longer silence.
«“Hello?”» The well-dressed man hesitates on the dead line. «“Mr. Prime Minister?”»
Meanwhile
Versatile Shipping Czechia
Secure Facility Level
Prague
Czechia
A remote process returns to Asi from Tafero’s phone, delivering a list of phone numbers lacking contact information. Tafero’s phone, however, is linked to the InVerse wireless network in this facility and has the required authentication keys, granting Asi access to guest network services. Enough to cross-reference the numbers with outside internet databases.
Tafero’s last call went out to a phone associated with Hermann J. Schumacher, an External Relations Officer with the European Space Agency. The prior call went to the security desk at Versatile Shipping. The five prior calls were all unlisted numbers with no known hits on the wider internet.
Through Tafero’s phone, Asi can see the larger InVerse network but knows that the device is connected to a partitioned “guest” network that she can’t use to tunnel into the deeper intranet. Her further analysis is cut off by goings-on in the meat world.
A trio of medical staff are rounding the corner dressed in pale teal scrubs, followed by another CCMED-Caduceus. The medics stop dead in their tracks when they catch sight of the liberated detainees and behind them the wreckage of Tafero and his squad. Before they have time to react, Asi feels something twitch behind her eye, an autonomous reaction to a sense organ being removed.
All the lights in the corridor go dark, then pop back on with orange emergency lighting. Security cameras are dead. The entire network has been shut down.
The medics raise their hands. One of them shouts something in Czech that Gabriella understands as “please don’t shoot.” He raises his hands and takes a step back, as do the other medics.
Kimiko—slouched against the side of her pod—seems unaware of her surroundings as she stares vacantly into the distance, her pupils widen far enough to eclipse her irises.
Zachery doesn't understand the words, but he doesn't look like he gives a shit either way. With no sympathy left in him, he leads the charge and lifts the gun he very much is not sure would fire again if he pulled the trigger, bluffing his way into a steadyhanded threat either way.
"Where are the others?!" He barks a question at the medics, advancing forward another step to point the gun at the nearest medic's face while his own twists in anger. "The others like us?" Then, with the sharpest possible flavour of desperation, he adds on the odd chance it might bear fruit: "Miller, Nicole?"
To be honest, Asi thought this was going relatively well, given the givens.
She shoots a look to Gabby after the medic makes their cry, looking for signs of comprehension on her part. "Here, let the bot take over," she suggests in a murmur to free Gabriella's capacity to engage with her words or potentially her gun if things go sour. One of the medical robots trailing them steps forward to take control of steering Kimiko's pod.
She keeps quiet in that transition, trying not to panic over the part of herself that's died with the facility being thrown into emergency power. "Français?" she fishes belatedly and impatiently in case that proves to be the hinge here. "Parlez-vous français?"
Gabriella nods to Asi’s suggestion, moving aside to let the bot take over the steerage of Kimiko’s course. She’s barely able to stand on her own two feet though adrenaline makes the impossible possible.
When they come upon the medics, she lifts the gun to point it at them – a back-up to Zachery’s far more aggressive threat as he moves in closer to point his gun in the man’s face.
“где наши люди?” she snaps, her native Russian much sharper and quicker on her tongue than the blunted consonants of her learned English. It’s not Czech, but the cognates are there – where are our people?
While there is a stammering of responses from the medics, any response to Asi’s attempt at conversation is halted by a communication handshake coming from the CCMED-Caduceus with the medics.
«We are sorry we are late.»
S.Attva communicates directly to Asi using the Caduceus drones as proxies.
«Jiba joined us as we began an attack on this facility’s network infrastructure, but it appears all power to telecommunications and security has been cut. A rescue team is en-route. We lost communications with your allies when comms were shut.»
Meanwhile, the medics reply to Gabriella in Russian. “«I—I don’t—»” He does know, though. He recognizes who they are in that moment seeing the bodysuits everyone is in. But Kimiko is the one to answer, as if she’d plucked the knowledge out of the ether a moment before the medic could speak it into being:
“They were taken to an incinerator.” Kimiko is fully lucid again, pupils narrowing from saucer-wide pools of darkness. “They may all be dead.”
“«They died. You—you all died? Everyone was—they were sent to the morgue and disposal.»” The medics don’t understand what Kimiko is saying but at the same time confirm her prognostication. “«There’s—there’s a medical waste incinerator a level below. The—we just went under lockdown, it won’t be accessible.»” They’re trying to buy their lives with loose change of truth.
«Jiba is outside scrambling external comms and radars, giving your allies a clear path should you reach the surface.»
“«Please—please don’t kill us.»”
Asi's head angles toward the medical bot down the hall when she feels its attempt to communicate with her, confusion rising. She knows S.attva's voice and feel, but it feels… like a lifetime ago that she last made contact with the conglomerate. For a moment all she can do is stare, bewilderedly.
If S.attva is here, talking to her, but claims that it can't communicate with the outside… had it poured everything into this assault? Were the bots the purusha's only vehicle for existence at the moment? At least there were the herd of them escorting the group already to serve as bodyguards— or backups, as the case might become.
She sounds much more confident as she angles her head toward Zachery, mentally adding one more to the list of bodies needing protection until she knows better. "There's rescue waiting for us on the surface," she tells him as much as Kimiko, unsure what Gabriella might bring back in terms of information. "Power may have been brought down to try and stall a technopathic attack from our rescuers. Or something else might be happening."
"In any case, up is out," and Asi seems absolutely certain of that.
Kimiko’s sudden return is met with a wide-eyed look from Gabriella, but the Russian nods. “They say the same. It’s one level down, that we were all being sent there, but they say it won’t be accessible,” she repeats.
She looks up, and then frowns. “Up is out,” she repeats Kimiko, but adds, frowning, “but down are… friends?” Her wide green-eyed gaze darts to Zachery, whose wife is among those who may have been sent to be burnt alive.
“If the power is off, maybe the incinerator went down before…” Her mouth snaps shut and she shakes her head. “We should check. Down. Then up and out.”
"If they're alive, they'll also be fighting their way up and out," Asi offers up as a counterargument, but she glances to Zachery to see if he even is willing to listen to it being made.
Zachery's gaze stays on the medic closest to him, but the stolen gun ticks lower at Kimiko's words — and then once more as their meaning sets in through Kimiko and Gabriella's processing. Put in the position of tiebreaker, he wavers. In the midst of mouse-quick hearts and decisions.
His face lacks the apparent rage that splattered him in blood just moments earlier when he responds, with only a few seconds' delay, "If… if the power just went out— if they're alive, then…" He forces his final answer out, firm and sure in spite of possible reluctance. "I believe Nicole can handle herself. We get help first."
He shifts his weight as if he's about to move past the medics, but he gun comes up again, this time pressed against one of their necks as a new thought crosses his mind and stalls him acting on the decision that was JUST made — because how long had they even been in the pods? How much time had passed since his last, real, non-fabricated memories?
"One last thing," he tells the people behind him more than anyone, before turning his full, cold attention to the medic again. "Children, twins—" he starts, but simplifies with a sneer, "Babies. Alive? Yes or fucking no."
Gabriella translates the question to Russian: “«The twin babies – are they alive? Where?»”
“«Babies?»” One of the medics looks bewildered. “«There’s no children h—»”
“«They’re alive.»” Another says, eliciting a sincere look of shock from the other two, who say nothing. “«Twins. Delivered nine months ago. Doctor Wenyi oversaw. I—I don’t know any more than that, I swear.»”
«We need to prioritize surface-level evacuation.» S.Attva reports from the robot they occupy. «Minimal data available on this facility. This corridor leads to a freight elevator that exits at a shipping facility on the surface. If the elevator is not in service, the shaft may still be navigable by climbing. It is likely where Mr. Tafero and his men were taking you.»
“We didn’t know.” The medic who knew of the babies says in stilted English. “That you were still alive. I swear. There was collapse of the network you were connected to. Brain death.” She spreads her hands. “You’re supposed to be dead,” is said as an apology.
«Alternatively, we could return to deeper in this facility and try reconnecting with the others. But there is no guarantee anyone else other than you has survived up until this point. We believe this hallway connects to a medical research wing.»
Asi looks askance at that news, mulling over the detail– weighing it against their probable ability to do anything aside from secure their own escape. «There's no guarantee– but all of us were ready to escape by the end. All of us remembered. If they woke, they're fighting, and they'll make it out.» she conveys in silence.
The one woman among the medics nods agreement to the first. She’s trying to be useful. “Some security systems are—are still active without power. Magnetic passcode locks.” Child’s play for a technopath to overpower. “Cameras are probably down. I—I don’t know why the power is out.”
Kimiko rakes her one hand through her hair, wringing some of the silvery fluid out of it. “There’s detention cells here,” she says with halting certainty, as if discussing the details of a dream. “Test subjects. Human.” Her attention focuses on the doctor. “This level?”
The female doctor looks shocked that Kimiko knows that. She starts to open her mouth to say something, but Kimiko interrupts: “We could rescue them, if we go further in.”
Fuck. Asi's jaw tightens, and she takes a moment to look past the medics to the bot S.Attva is occupying. Her mind is racing now; screaming, in fact. Her gaze loses its focus. She tries in vain to reach out to the spider of her sense that's lost in a downed system. Her hand tightens around the gun in her hand, eyes going down next.
"We're weak, after everything we've been through," she concedes. "The other test subjects might not have been in stasis. Might be stronger than us, which could come in hand if we run into more of…" Whatever word suited Tafero's people.
Asi's posture straightens, and she looks away from the direction of the elevator, further inside the building. "And besides…" Some piece of her she's inherently aware she's missing now speaks to her anyway, and it says: "We all deserve freedom."
As the medic answers her question in Russian, Gabriella nods and turns to Zachery. “They’re alive. They were delivered, but they don’t know where they are now. Doctor Wenyi delivered them,” she translates, swiftly and efficiently, as if she’s used to translating between languages.
Her gaze darts over to Kimiko, then Asi, trying to pick up the pieces of that other, disparate conversation. “Test subjects – not our people? Different people?” Gabby asks, then nods. “Yes. We free all the people.”
To the doctors and medics, she gestures for them to come along – with the gun she still holds. “You have keys and eyeballs for retina scans. You come with us, too.”
Zachery's glances between the medic's faces become quietly but increasingly frantic, like he's hoping to spot the lie on one of them.
Nine months? But it was yesterday. Or a lifetime ago, maybe. But nine months. And… surely they wouldn't have kept them here, if it'd been that long. Surely.
The gun is lowered in an unblinking daze, and he doesn't show much sign of hearing anything after Gabriella's translation. A least, until he turns away from the medics and gives an absent sort of nod. "I am not putting myself in danger for people I don't even know," he decides, but circles around the medics to herd them further inside the building anyway, with a tiny tilt upward of his gun. "Go on, then."
Maybe a human shield or three will help. He doesn't look pleased about it, thumbing some blood away from his one functional eye.
The medics crowd together under Zachery’s direction, arms raised and hands folded behind their heads. They’re worried but not outright panicking. It’s hard to tell what their past experiences are, but it feels like this may not be the first time they’ve been threatened by armed assailants before.
“My name is Molly,” the medic who has chosen to speak in English says. Then gestures to the other. “Javad. Luka.” Each other medic nods as they’re introduced. Asi understands what Molly is trying to do, ingratiate herself with her captors, put names to faces, make it harder for people who haven’t killed before to consider executing them.
“I do not know your names,” is a revelation Molly makes that doesn’t receive an immediate response beyond:
«Irrelevant.» S.Attva steps forward in his robotic frame. «This body is disposable. Should we come under fire, please seek cover behind it.» Though Asi isn’t sure how disposable. There’s only three of them and if S.Attva is cut off from telecommunications, he only has so many vessels to survive in.
Kimiko leans over the side of her medical pod, looking down at the floor, then at her leg missing from the knee down. Without the machines she’ll have little ease navigating the laboratory. Her eyes narrow, pupils dilate wide. She begins searching for something beyond the confines of her flesh in silence.
“The lab is this way,” Molly says in a steady, even voice, gesturing back the way Tafero and his crew had come from. “The… clients—” she glances in the direction Tafero and his squad had taken them, “—picked you up there.”
Zachery sharply exhales in what would be a laugh if he wasn't so constantly still between worlds. "We're not giving you our names — or anything else anymore, for that matter."
But he's heard this tone before. He knows that sort of trained defeat inside out, and though his words are clear, the recognition wrings the emotion out of his voice when he adds, "Relax. Keep your distance, but put your arms down. When they ask, tell them you watched us kill a man and then told us fucking nothing, alright? We held a gun to your heads the entire time."
As he speaks, he looks to Kimiko, but seems uncertain what to do about that situation, then looks somewhat glassily from Asi to Gabriella.
“Are her prosthetics around here somewhere?” Gabriella asks the medic bluntly, even as she moves closer to Kimiko. “You, Luka. You push.” That will at least keep one set of medic’s hands in sight but also provide them another set of (robotic) hands via the machine that’s allied itself to Asi.
“You have not met your children yet, either,” the Russian points out to Zachery a little primly. “But you are willing to put yourself in danger for them. Not that I’m saying we should not rescue your children. The opposite, actually.”
Asi looks to the robotic frame that steps forward, still speaking only to her. She looks at it almost sternly and says aloud, "If the frame begins to fail, then abandon it. If we lose all of them…" She lifts a hand, touches it gingerly to the side of her head below where she knows the port there sits on her skull like a gaping wound – one that meshes technology with biology. "Fall back to me."
From there, she looks to the others, lowering her hand and securing it around her stolen gun. "Let's be quick about this," she says, urging the machines ahead of their human hostages with a blink before she follows impatiently at their backs.
The sudden, shocking sound of automatic gunfire causes the medics to startle and scramble toward the walls of the corridor, covering their heads. But the gunfire isn’t aimed down the hall, it’s too muffled. It’s coming from the rooms up ahead, the detention cells for human experimentation that Kimiko had called out.
Under the sodium-lamp orange glow of the security lights, the concrete walls are seen to transition to a thick reinforced glass creating sequestered fish-tank containment rooms. There are four cells in this block, each with low cots and airlocked pairs of security doors facing the hall. There are prisoners in each cell, banging their hands against the glass walls, muffled cries for help barely audible through the thick barriers.
The sound of gunfire is coming from the nearest cell on the right, its doors wide open. Two figures in matte black body armor and gas-masked helmets stand in the hall, looking into the cell. Each carries an assault rifle trained at the entrance. One more figure is inside, shooting down at a prone figure in a hospital gown covered in blood. Multiple shots to the head and chest.
The right-most figure in the hall catches sight of the group coming round the corner, turning his rifle down the hall. There is no warning, no call to halt, just a spray of automatic gunfire directed down the middle of the hall. That gunfire elicits the other soldier in the hall to turn, firing as well.
The CCMED Caduceus at the front of the group take the brunt of the gunfire, shattering portions of their plastic exterior frame apart and ripping through internal components. These are not combat robots and they aren’t designed to withstand this kind of abuse.
The sharply intense look Zachery shoots Gabriella doesn't have time to settle into anything specific amidst the need to get a move on, and then even less so when more gunshots ring off again. Instinct has him sidestep behind their robotic ally with a panicked grimace.
He's halfway into ducking down when an even newer instinct stops him in his tracks, redirecting his attention to what he can see of their closest attacker — he may not know for sure what happened earlier with Tafero, whose blood he's still coated in, but he has a theory, and it's time for the scientific method of fucking around and finding out.
Risking possible gunshots as plastic fragments skate past, he locks his one eye on a gas mask and reaches, mentally, both for their attacker and whatever the fuck happened earlier.
Asi is barely around the corner when the gunfire opens up, leading her to reach forward to pull back one of the medics– Molly– by the back of her scrubs. Her eyes narrow, seeing both through the Caduceus' eyes and her own while she seeks a focus she doesn't fully feel. Using the advantage of having eyes without having been around the corner already, she readies her gun and angles shots around the corner and the medical bots to return fire at the armed executioners. They might be armoured, but no one likes being shot at.
The locked doors sing to be opened, but they're also the only 'protection' from summary execution the moment they open. That was where they came in, she supposed.
"Gabby, I'm opening the cells," she says, turning her head but not her eyes to the Russian for a moment. "Let's give them some covering fire." Neon blue flares into the dark of her eyes again as she reaches beyond herself with her ability, tricking magnetic locks open at the moment she sprays another mess of shots at the mercenaries down the hall.
As soon as the soldiers turn their rifles on the group, Gabriella ducks back behind the corner for cover, then leans out to pull the trigger of her own weapon. Glittering-green eyes narrow as she tries to focus the spray of bullets strategically for the weak spots of armor, but it’s a struggle to channel the rush of adrenaline into that sort of focus when she’s had maybe a few hours of target practice.
She at least manages to aim in a way that doesn’t put Zachery in any danger when he steps out to play with his new toy.
“What the fuck is this place,” Gabby mutters, gaze darting over to the nearest of the cells, between squeezes of the trigger down the hall to their would-be executioners. “Are they stealing more people to make more robot dolls?” She doesn’t expect an answer from Zachery or Asi,occupied as they are, but perhaps one from the medics behind her.
One of the liquidation team members—settled under Zachery’s intense focus—lurches and staggers, clutching at his helmet and stumbling to the side into a wall. He groans, not in the death-rattle agony of Tafero, but in obvious pain. He dry heaves, unable to focus on anything other than the sudden discomfort writhing around his body like a hand moving under his skin and over his muscles.
Gunfire howls down the hallway. Gabriella’s shots aren’t accurate, but they are alarming. The liquidation team wasn’t prepared for an armed resistance beyond the first floor. The hardened armor the liquidation team is donned in shrugs off most of the suppressing fire, but it forces them to take cover around corners—corners that, unmercifully to them—are transparent, giving away their position.
As Asi reaches out and forces the magnetic locks open, S.Attva lashes out like a shark in dark waters. One of the liquidation team that pops out of cover to return fire suddenly screams. He gets off just a few shots that pepper the ceiling as his eyes glow with orange light and smoke issues from the seams of his helmet and respirator. A moment later his eyes explode in a shower of sparks and smoke pours out of blackened sockets.
Asi can feel what happened. Not by happenstance, but as if one of her digital hands had been taken and pressed up against what happened. Teaching. She can feel now the cybernetic components in the liquidation officer, one that had the technopathic vulnerability of network capability. It allowed S.Attva to pry it open like a tiger ripping open a rib-cage, and then overloaded every single process he could touch.
{Like that.} Asi recognizes the vulnerabilities now, though not every liquidation officer may have them. But it also means another harrowing thing: these aren’t ordinary people. They’re augmented.
Only one of the liquidation team members is still a threat, and he can clearly be seen hunkering behind the door, reaching for something at his waist as the three surviving detainees slip the bonds of their cells. The first out the door is a pale blonde woman with cold blue eyes. She staggers, barefoot and disoriented, leaving watery footprints behind her. She’s sweating profusely, using one hand on the wall to prop herself up. She isn’t sure which way to run.
Asi recognizes her. She saw her die at Eve’s rally-turned-massacre in the Pine Barrens over a year ago. Barbara Zimmerman. Or at least someone who looks shockingly like her.
Behind Tracy stumbles another, older woman. Dressed in the same slate-gray jumpsuit. Her hair is chalk white, eyes sunken and exhausted. As she scrambles away from the direction of the liquidation team, blindly following Tracy, she spots Zachery and the others and freezes in her tracks. Her shoulders rise and fall and she raises her hands, but keeps moving forward.
No one here knows who Kate Archer is, and that lack of recognition in the eyes of the opposing force identifies safety for her. The third, however.
That’s a different story entirely.
Some Time Ago
Gone is the ornate decor; the walls shrink in size to a smaller room with walls papered by flyers and photographs and stickers. The floor hardens to concrete beneath their feet. The small bar they find themselves in isn’t much to look at, yet there’s something to look at no matter where one looks. Every inch of every wall has been covered over the years. Here, band gig announcements, movie posters and stickers for both Russian goods and those from other countries all coexist with little rhyme or reason. There’s no theme, no connective thread.
The bartender sits reading a newspaper behind a small counter that only two at most could stand behind; there are no bar stools but a few mismatched tables around the room. One of the walls behind the bar has an inset built in to house CDs, and the slim spines of the jewel cases create a flat surface. A CD player from the nineties plays a Motorama song, dark and moody, sounding like it’s 30 years older than it is, which suits the bar perfectly.
But it isn’t the bar itself that they’re here to see, it seems.
One of the dark-clad customers rises from the corner seat – Gabriella, grown, looking much as she does today but for the drab clothing she wears and a darker shade of golden hair. She nods to the bartender before moving toward a tiny corridor at the back of the bar, one that leads either to a single-toilet bathroom well advertised by the smell of urine coming from the open door, or a narrow stairway that leads upstairs. It’s the stairs that Gabriella takes – they’re barely wide enough for a single person; someone broader than usual would have to turn sideways to manage.
The Gabby who’s on this terrible road trip down sighs, as she trudges upward. “This place is gross,” she murmurs.
Daphne squints up at the steps and sighs. “Why do there have to be stairs?”
The stairs are narrow, steep, and unwelcoming. Old in the way they creak underfoot, allowing the walls to lean in claustrophobically. The darkly-dressed Gabriella ascends to a door plastered in partly torn-off band flyers. There’s a stencil painted on the door in red, like a greeting.
ТОЛЬКО ЛЮДИ
Gabriella opens the door, stepping into a converted attic loft. There’s one light on, a single club with a conical shade over a folding table laid out with a Russian street atlas. There, cast in extremes of light and dark, is a figure torn from the pages of Wolves of Valhalla.
A ghost who should be dead.
Present Day
Gabriella recognizes the face of Feng Daiyu immediately, but connecting the dots of how he got here is impossible in the moment. Feng, on seeing Gabriella, freezes in his tracks.
In this moment, she mirrors him, her green eyes wide as she locks eyes with him. “ублюдок,” she murmurs, and the gun she holds turns to him instead. She grips it so tightly, her knuckles blanch, and her finger trembles at the trigger.
“Feng. Long time no see,” Gabby manages to say through gritted teeth. She eyes the two women, but her attention is reserved for the man she’s been tracking through her dreams while asleep in her coffin here. “You do seem to have a thing for blondes. When did karma finally catch up to you? They say she’s a bitch, but…”
A smile curves her lips. “So am I.”
It seems for a moment Gabriella is about to shoot, but something stays her hand. A Feng in the hand…
“You help us get out of here, and I won’t kill you today.” The words are spoken with all of the power and authority of her father, back in Russia. She lifts her chin, almost regally, haughtily, and juts her chin in the direction of the man from the liquidation team hiding behind the transparent wall. “Go take care of him before he becomes a problem, Nidhogg.”
Then, as if absolutely sure he’ll do just that, she glances to the women. “How are you useful?”
Meanwhile, Asi is struggling with her autonomy, S.attva's intrusion upon her ability taking her by surprise. Her reapproach toward feeling meritlessly untouchable is threatened again, keeping her from looking and engaging as much as she otherwise might be on top of things. A choked breath leaves her as she feels the cybernetics fry under an incorporeal hand, a limb she was still learning shape of, and the nose of her gun lowers.
Gabby's recognition of one of the prisoners draws her back to the moment, invisible limb pawing for the other guard. She sees better the hidden angle he's taking through the frontmost Caduceus, who she directs to step forward toward the cell he's in, to keep an eye on him and act if needed. But Gabriella has made her orders of Feng, too, and she means to leave plenty room for that.
Asi spares the man only one suspicion-filled glance before she looks to Archer and Tracy, nose of her gun lowering another nod still. "It's likely a climb out through the elevator shaft that's getting us to safety today. Are both of you good for it?"
Bullets whizzing past him nor new arrivals seem to be able to peel Zachery's attention away from his one point of interest — the staggering liquidation team member. His eye tracks the armoured figure as if there's something particular shiny about him, brow knit with equal measure confusion and fascination, though his posture is completely relaxed. Something vaguely pleased tugs at a corner of his mouth, before his expression flattens out again.
Only when his point of focus hit the ground does he utter a breathy, "Huh." A few seconds later, he looks around, catching up on everything else a little late with a half-sneer of an expression that might spell out 'how is everything more confusing on this side of the mindfuck?'.
Feng’s focus on Gabriella is leveled down at her firearm. His expression is a flat line of tension in anticipation of gunfire that never comes. Instead, he works his jaw and follows Gabby’s gaze to the two women in question, each of them—and Gabby’s companions—all cyphers to him.
The steely-eyed blonde detainee—Tracy—levels a look on Gabriella, then Asi. “Whatever it takes to get me the hell out of here. I guarantee you, whoever the fuck put me in here, when we get out—” She cuts herself off, stepping behind one of the robots, giving it both a bewildered and wide-eyed stare of awe. “Whatever it takes.” She doubles back to finish.
Archer, however, seems less disoriented than Tracy. The gray-haired woman recognizes everyone gathered here, there’s an unmistakable look of shock in her eyes. They settle, for a moment, on the silent and slouched figure of Kimiko Nakamura, then darts back over her shoulder to the sole liquidation soldier still a threat, hunched around a corner.
“I can get us out of here.” Archer is quick to state, hands trembling. “I just—I need whatever they put in me to wear off. But I can get us anywhere in the world.” That elicits a quick side-eye from Feng. The more she speaks, the more there’s a lingering sense of Deja-Vu about Archer. It feels like someone once met in a dream. Or maybe it’s just the simulation lingering.
Mere moments have passed by the time the liquidation member who is still a threat moves. Asi had been keeping a keen eye on him, and when he boosts up from a crouch and toward the door she’s right there inhabiting the caduceus, one mechanical arm going straight for the throat, lifting him off of his—
clink, clank
—feet. As he paws at the mechanical arm, dropping the live grenade he was holding at Asi’s feet.
Well, so much for letting Feng handle the one in there. She'd had a feeling that one might do something stupid like this. "Grenade!" she shouts with her own voice, as the medbot steps fully into the cell with the grenade rattling at its feet like a particularly shitty football. Then, just as Asi had triggered the ones surrounding open before, now the door snaps closed again behind it.
She feels sickeningly validated in her decision to hang toward the rear in this encounter.
When the grenade falls, Gabby’s gun swings that way, but the robots and Asi seem to have that under control. She quickly backs away from the cell that Asi’s medbot dribbles the grenade into, though she has enough presence of mind to put the gun back on the trio of freed detainees that they maybe should have left inside.
Unless they can help get them out.
“Strike one,” she tells Feng. “Faster next time.” She nods to Archer. “You two, I like. Let’s go.”
Showing still some amount of intact survival instinct, Zachery scrambles a few steps back when the grenade is called out, only to be left hissing a breath of twisted relief out from between his teeth when it - and the person who dispensed it - cease to be as much of a problem as he thought they were going to be.
"Anywhere sounds nice," he replies in turn to Archer, shooting her a somewhat distracted look.
Zachery’s statement is punctuated by the muffled pop of a grenade detonating inside of a closed, glass-walled room. The windows flash bright white, not from illumination but from the countless spiderweb fractures in the six inches of reinforced glass. Only Asi knows that the caduceus was destroyed in the blast, and the last signal it sent back all but confirmed the liquidation team member was, also, liquidated.
Archer jolts at the sound, clutching a hand at the middle of her chest, eyes wide and unblinking. Her hand trembles and she manages a nervous smile that halfway acknowledges Zachery’s sentiment.
Feng, too, was startled by the blast but rolls it off with a circular motion of his shoulders. He eyes Gabby, expression sour, but it too is quick to pass. It doesn’t help that Tracy manages the pettiest of smiles in Feng’s direction when Gabriella declares she likes her.
“Which way’s out?” Tracy asks, “I was unconscious when they brought me down here. Is this Fort Dietrich? Maryland?”
Feng tilts his head to the side and narrows his eyes at her. “Maryland?” Is his incredulous reply.
“Czechia,” Archer is quick to reply, and changes the subject to something more relevant. “We don’t need to go anywhere, I just need a few minutes to let the drugs wear off and we can be gone. Let’s just hide down here, then get out while we can. We poke our heads topside and we’re as good as dead.”
The captive medics, Molly, Javad, and Luka do not chime in, staying hunched and quiet within Zachery’s line of sight, close to a wall. They keep their eyes down, focused on the floor, wanting nothing more than to be overlooked in this moment.
«Waiting is a potentially sound plan.» S.Attva suggests from his hijacked robot, «But obviously comes at its own risks and moral complication.»
As this conversation happens, Kimiko suddenly snaps back to reality. Her eyes track side to side, processing something she’s learned. Frustration fills her and she grips the side of her medical pod with her one good hand. “Why are we standing here?” Kimiko snaps. Then, on catching sight of Feng startles and looks at the others in disoriented confusion.
“There’s more labs past here.” Molly finally speaks up. “No more detainees, but the uh, prosthetics for your—your friend? They’re still present.” She still hasn’t answered Gabby’s question about what was going on in these labs. “The—the elevators nearby will be powered down. This uh,” she searches for the right words, “security incident locks the facility down.”
«The systems are not wireless.» S.Attva adds for Asi’s benefit. «However, you may be able to bring a lift online. Should we wish to move again and not take the stairwell.»
Molly glances at the caduceus S.Attva is puppeteering, not fully aware of why or how it’s speaking. “These—” she nods to the corpse of one of the liquidation officers, “men. They won’t be using the lifts. Stair access, probably?”
Meanwhile, one of the liquidation team is still functionally alive. He stumbles and lurches inside one of the labs, pawing at his insides, groaning against the sensation of what bodily horror Zachery is insinuating within. Blood has begun to week through the fabric of his uniform, drizzling in pools at his feet.
As others respond to the Caduceus, it dawns on Asi then she wasn't sure when S.attva went from speaking only to her to the others. Now? Possibly now. Maybe she's not doing as great as she thought. Especially not having been in something that just died. She's fine. Everything is fine. She should have let go of the bot sooner, but she wasn't sure when the ignition would go, which is something she should have known, but she was…
Oh. She's not herself anymore.
Asami looks back to Kimiko and offers her a small nod, looking more nervous than she was even moments ago. She's unaware that Zachery can effectively see her sudden anxiety in the form of her heart racing, and tries to play it off. "Kimiko's right. We can't afford to stand still right now. They'll be looking for places they can find either prisoners, like here, or staff, like those labs. It…"
The words leave her before she can stop herself. "It's like Pac-Man," comes from her, helpless to find another set of words, though she sounds like she regrets it as she says it. "They know the layout and we're just the blue ghosts trying to find our way around."
"The elevator being something not under their control right now is an advantage of ours we should use, and immediately." Sorry, Kimiko. "There are other prisoners, too, who need out of here just as much as we do." Asami looks to Archer, something pleading in her gaze. "Your plan to get us all out as soon as the negation wears off still sounds like a great one. But nobody else down here in a cell or in a pod deserves to be stuck here."
"So let's–" She very nearly starts to take the lead herself before she thinks better of it, directing their hostage scientists ahead of her with a movement of the rifle's muzzle. "Go."
Zachery momentarily looks like he's stuck on finding out they're in Czechia. And: "We don't even know how many others there are."
But as he scratches absently at his blood-sweared face, he's distracted. Distracted trying to make sense of all the sensory input he's been privy to, but also by blood trail on the ground, the shuffling of unfinished business lurching into the lab.
"—Hey! Stop!" He suddenly yells, apparently forgetting everything else and, with a start, follows after the still living liquidation team member like it's a dog having escaped its leash. "Shit, I've never—" He mutters in a hurry as if by some way of excuse, a sliver of contained excitement remaining in his eye and gait both. "This is new. I've never done that. Never been able to."
Her eyes locked on Feng’s face, Gabby listens to the others, before she tips her head in Asi’s direction with a slow nod of assent. “My vote also is for the lift. We will just need to be ready for what may be on the other side of the doors, but better than being caught in a stairwell, yes?”
At Zachery’s sudden yell, her green-eyed gaze slides over to him for a moment, and she grimaces at his excitement as she eyes the man pawing at the glass. “That is your doing?” she asks. “I will be nicer to you, then.”
Her focus returns to Feng, Tracy, and Archer. “If you make us regret releasing you, I will haunt your pathetic dreams and make you wish you never met me and that you need to sleep to live. Let’s go. You too, Maryland and company.”
“Tracy.” She corrects with a little, self-important sneer.
“You heard her, Maryland.” Feng rasps, giving an askance look to Gabriella along with a reluctantly approving nod. But he doesn’t head toward the elevators, rather to where Kimiko slouches in her medical bed. He sees, now, her amputated leg and the metallic connections for what should be a prosthetic at the knee. Then the same on her missing arm. He says nothing, but offers her a wordless hand.
Kimiko stares at Feng, pupils momentarily turning to pitch-black saucers. Whatever she sees behind her eyes elicits her reaching out with her one good hand to take Feng’s in hers.
“让我帮你.2 Feng says softly, and he helps Kimiko up out of the bed as if she were as light as a feather. Kimiko’s hair moves as if she were underwater, and she floats toward the ground like a half-inflated balloon. When her one bare foot touches the tile, it carries none of the weight of her body, and with the slightest motion of her ankle she is able to alight up, weightlessly.
“Do stay close,” Feng says as he lets go of her hand, curling two fingers that gently tugs her toward him by an unseen thread. “Lest I lose you.”
S.Attva has watched all of this through the monocular lens of his inhabited Caduceus’ facial camera. The lens narrows down to a fine point, but widens when the drone shifts focus momentarily toward Zachery.
“Our abilities are returning,” Feng says to the others, “mine, at least.” He looks to Archer who shakes her head. Not yet. Tracy likewise.
Molly, Javad, and Luka move to the elevator doors, giving Asami a wide berth while nervously watching Zachery’s departure from the group.
Nearby, the struggling liquidation member Zachery is pursuing has slumped onto his knees, then fallen onto his side. He gasps, gurgling and breathless, and stares up at Zachery through a goggled gas mask. At this proximity, Zachery can feel the nonliving parts inside the soldier’s body. He is packed with cybernetic augmentations. Millions of dollars of hardware contained in a bag of meat bleeding out on the floor like a ruptured trash bag.
Tracy’s eyes follow Zachery, apart from the group, looming over the dying liquidation officer. “Is your boy… ok?” She asks the room without looking away.
Asami can only do so much at once, and right now, securing their elevator escape is something only uniquely she can do. She's down the hall with the hostages and the non-occupied Caduceus, gun in hand, until she's within range to touch a hand to the high-tech control panel, a flash of neon purple flaring through her eyes as she spreads herself out within that localized system.
Emergency access override, bringing it directly to current door, and…
She feels gratified when she knows the lift is on the way, and turns back to check on where the others are in time to hear Tracy's concern. "Miller!" she shouts back, feeling a bit of who she's supposed to be, who she was before all of this, layer a bit back over her and into her. In that moment, she directs the Caduceus under her control to stand guard before the stairwell access without conscious thought. "I'm sure we'll run into someone else you can try that trick on again. Let's go!"
Her head goes to the other bot next, asking aloud to the amalgamation occupying it, "What can you tell us about the situation upstairs? Outside? Even if it's outdated, it's better than knowing nothing. Where am I sending this lift?"
Asami's call to Zachery elicits a cant of his head, but instead of rejoining the group, he crouches next to his struggling handiwork and seems reluctant to take his eye fully off of what's in front of him. Someone utterly fascinating, and… someone very much suffering.
With Tafero, before, he acted on some newfound reflex. With this guy, it was some twisted instinct. This third time, he has to make a choice. Like this guy did, being here today. Something lifts his head a little higher. Contemplating what might be behind those goggled eyes — both in humanity and possible types of monitoring in that mess of tech — his fingers curl inward as if to grasp a decision made a little more tightly.
"Coming," he finally answers the group, before leaning forward to get a closer look, one knee and right hand landing squarely in the warm blood. Then, as more of it begins to pour out between the armour with a push of his palm against the floor, he says, "I hope it was worth it."
Feng’s words find Gabby squinting at him, one brow lifting. “Well, that’s exciting news. What can you do, because if you turn it on me, I promise you that you will regret it. If we are all going to get out of this fucking place, we need to be on the same side.”
Her head tips curiously as she watches his gentle care of Kimiko and the way Kimiko defies gravity, before she looks to Tracy, and shakes her head. “No. None of us are ok. We’re the opposite of ok. But we’re alive, and we’d like to stay that way.”
After a moment, she adds a begrudging “Tracy,” not quite an apology.
“Gravity manipulation,” Feng quietly answers with little guile in his tone. “That is what the doctors I later killed called it, at any rate.” Kimiko gives Feng a side-eye, then turns her attention toward the others as the group reconvenes.
“Up is out. This is all I know.” Kimiko asserts, remembering the half-dream words spoken by Colin Verse.
The robot occupied by S.Attva nods in agreement to Kimiko. «At present, your artificial selves and a Wolfhound support squad are engaging with surface-level deterrents. Your corporate AI,» he directs to Kimiko, «Jiba, is there acting as countermeasure on communications and radar, clearing an opening and an exit. But this window is rapidly closing.»
“Jiba is—here?” Kimiko’s reaction is both shock and dread. If the AI of Yamagato Park has been released from his leash it means he is no longer present in the park to protect it from outside intrusion.
«The Crito-corporate liquidation team is present on many levels of this facility. We do not have exact numbers. We must hurry to the surface.»
As this conversation takes place, subprocesses within Asi’s mind are moving through the systems of the lift, finding road-blocks at every turn. Electrical systems and subsystems have been deactivated, but Crito’s attempt to circumvent the lift’s use was not comprehensive, not against a technopath of Asi’s skill. The power for the emergency lights and HVAC systems are still operational, and those have operational automated systems. Ones her subprocesses can breach, hijacking the power subnet of the elevators.
“Again, once my ability is back… I promise: anywhere in the world.” Archer interjects. “If what this—machine is saying is accurate, we don’t have time to save everyone. We have to save ourselves.”
“I, for one, would like to live long enough to exact an excruciating and litigious revenge on every single person responsible for this nightmare.” Tracy says through her gritted teeth. This elicits a look from S.Attva’s mechanized chassis. “What?” Tracy barks at S.Attva, “I don’t have any batteries for you, or whatever you want.”
«It is nothing.» S.Attva says quietly. Something Asi, able to perceive more of S.Attva than the others perceives as… sadness. Longing. Grief.
“Whatever. When we get out of here the President is—” Tracy’s bombast is cut by the sudden emergence of a sheet of fire from beneath one of the nearby stairwell doors. Tracy shrieks and jumps back, Feng steps in front of Kimiko while tucking a hand for her to hold behind his back, which keeps her buoyant. As S.Attva turns toward the rippling sheet of fire, it is reflected in his lenses as it takes human shape.
A familiar human.
A moment later the stairwell door opens behind Abby, and standing in the doorway behind Abby’s incendiary form is another friendly face.
Behind Isa, there are others, hunkered down in the stairwell, visible in both the orange emergency light and the glow of Abby’s incendiary form: Gillian and Brynn, as well as a very nervous looking and unfamiliar man in a gray jumpsuit with the name BORIS in a patch on his chest.
Asami flinches when the flame blasts its way free, but the adrenaline it sets off in her, not knowing if the source might be the incineration they escaped from catching back up with them, spurs her to focus and hurry in her fight with the system. Her eyes are unfocused as her thoughts spider across the system with more ferocity than before, glowing violet.
"やった," she whispers with fervent, glorious relief as the elevator chimes, and then comes back to herself. Her eyes are still neon as she turns to see Abby— fighting down a primal fear of the negation ability the woman clearly no longer has in a way that makes her stomach drop again— and the others behind her.
"Our other selves are on the other end of this lift, and they have Wolfhound with them," she calls out to those who've joined them and their trio of robot frames, including the one that autonomously stumbled back from danger when fire began leaking from the stairwell initially. "Up is out," Asami repeats the mantra, reassured in its safety now that S.attva has confirmed the situation Colin only had so much insight into.
"Up we fucking go, then!" Zachery chimes in with some stiffly delivered urgency, rejoining his group with his face and hands smeared with others' blood, and holding a comically large gun as if it were a cudgel. "Anywhere in the world can be a backup for whenever it becomes…" His speech slows as his brain catches up to the new arrivals, "… available to… us— bloody hell that's a lot of fire, hello. Please can we get a fucking move on."
Boris gets a one-eyed glare leveled at him, and for a moment it looks like he's about to say something else, but as if the adrenaline-fueled everything since waking up visibly is finally beginning to take its toll, he falls silent. Nine fucking months. Surely not here.
In this moment Isabelle Khan is of one mind, two minds actually. Getting out of here, finding Shahid and getting them both back to Namiko. Three minds, four if you counted the murderous rage she felt inside for the company that had done this to them.
None of these people are her husband but they could help her reach him.
Isa's eyes narrow at the interns, a quick nod to Zachery and Asi but she is already moving towards the exit and the stairs. "Brought a gift, don't break him." The sight of Kimiko makes the pyrokinetic pause at the door and she looks at the woman with piercing hazel eyes at her boss or former boss. "Your people ensured my family's safety." It doesn't matter to Isabelle that Kimiko is here with her and Shahid as well. But it did matter that Kaito trained Isabelle and gave her a lifeline when no one else could.
Okay, she's of five minds. Bring Kimiko back home for her daddy.
"Let's go Kimiko."
As quick as the introductions go, the woman with the fire caressing her arm begins again to make for the exit.
Gray eyes peer around the two fire-wielders, and Brynn's gaze falls on the faces in the room. The silence that she lives in is absolute, and although it's a disadvantage not to have the kind of 'hearing' that she experienced inside the dreamworld, it's actually better for her – less distraction, more ability to focus on the here and now. These are not the faces she wishes they were, but some of them are familiar from the not-this-world life. Asami is someone her mother— no, Aunt Kaylee? Trusted. Got them rallied and out of there. So there is some amount of relief in that knowledge, jumbled as it is. When Isabelle turns to head back for the door, she gently tugs Aunt Gillian with her to the side of that path. Abby and Isabelle are definitely the scariest of the group she is part of. She's content to let them lead the way, relying on Aunt Abby and Aunt Gillian to tell her anything she needs to know.
“Useful. Just don’t try to be cute with it, Nidhogg. We’re on the same team today,” Gabriella tells Feng, then reaches to boop Archer on the nose. “You, I like. After we get our other people, we can go somewhere. How many can you take with you? That’s probably an important fact to know, hm?”
But fire pulls her focus away for a moment, her wide eyes growing wider before she recognizes the people coming their way. “The more the merrier, is that not a saying?” Asami’s sitrep turns her green gaze that way and she nods her understanding. “Up is out. To the elevator, friends and frenemies.”
There’s a lot going on and a lot of faces that Gillian recognizes from many different lives, and some she needs to ignore or she won’t be able to control the amount of energy that is flowing out of her, or the direction that it goes. There’s her daughter’s… Her "niece's” fencing teacher. There’s her friend’s husband. She closes her eyes for a moment and leans against Brynn. One of her other children.
One of so many.
As the elevator closes them in, she asks a simple question, “Is everyone here on our side?”
She pointedly avoided looking at Feng after a passing glance for— reasons. Her memory might be playing tricks on her, after all. She’s not sure which memories are even hers anymore.
In the current situation, though, there's only two sides.
Flame reconstitutes into vaguely friend shaped then certainly friend shaped and the heat tamped down as low as she can get it without risking becoming corporeal again. Her gaze flicks from person to person even as much like the others, Abigail's having a bit of a hard time processing the people in front of her. Some are familiar, others not. Some of the medical robots too it would seem. But time is limited and even as Zachery and Asi quickly lay out what they already know to a degree, there’s a flicker of her flame briefly to a warmer shade at the news that their replacements are up as well as wolfhound.
“Up is out,” Abigail's slightly muffled voice agrees as she turns back toward the door to quickly relay the news to Brynn if Gillian hasn’t already. “Get back home to Kat-” She has to stop herself. “Kasha.” And she’s moving, giving berth to those behind her so she can slip back out into the hall and follow the instructions given. Up, up, up.
As the two groups of escapees become one, Tracy pauses to rake sweat-slicked hair back from her face, and her fingertips brush a hard piece of metal on her scalp. First her touch recoils, then picks at the edges of a rectangular port above and behind her right ear. Her nails click at the edges, and confusion spreads across her face.
Seeing her expression, S.Attva looks at Tracy and says, «You have been surgically altered. A brain-machine interface is…» He hesitates for a moment, in a way that is unlike him. «Likely.»
“Fucking amazing,” Tracy whispers as she looks around the hallway. “Bots first.” She insists as the sound of the lift’s arrival chimes into a blood-spattered hallway. S.Attva narrows his host-machine’s irises at Tracy’s comment, then turns to enter the elevator with thudding strides.
As the lift fills, Feng guides Kimiko in until she can brace against a wall, then releases her hand. Gravity reasserts itself on her, and she slouches against the wall, up until S.Attva reaches out with a mechanical arm to help stabilize her. She affords the machine a brief, thankful look.
Feng considers Abby for a moment, watching her resort to the stairwell rather than cease her incendiary form and join the others in the elevator. He regards her with a momentary curiosity, then a nod of respect before stepping into the elevator. As Abby’s form disappears into the stairwell, Feng casts an askance look at Gillian, watching her being supported by Brynn. There’s a ghost of familiarity there, but he can’t quite place where he knows her from.
“Do you have one?” Tracy asks Archer as they stand next to one another in the lift, tapping a finger at the cranial implant she’s discovered in her own skull. Archer reaches up, fingers gliding under her gray hair, searching for a similar invasive procedure, only to find nothing. She shakes her head, and Tracy sinks into a deep torpor of uncertainty and half-formed memories of ice and muffled voices.
Asi’s consciousness reconnects with subprocesses, the elevator system is fully reconnected to all floors. She’s also scouting other still-dormant sections of the facility’s network inaccessible to her, but evident through labeled routes that should be functioning. Maglev station raises a moment of curiosity, something that wasn’t in the Wolfhound plans. But that, as it seems, is down.
And up is out.
As the elevator doors slide closed, that is the only hope anyone has.
Meanwhile
Международный аэропорт Шереметьево
Sheremetyevo International Airport
Москва, Россия
Moscow, Russia
"FUCK!"
Morgan Atkins smashes the receiver of a pay phone against a concrete wall several times. He tries to throw the receiver after, but it just swings around by the cord and clatters against the wall. A dialtone emits from the cracked mouthpiece, and Atkins stares at it amid the noise of a bustling airport. "Fuck," he hisses, scrubbing his hands up and down his face. "Fuck, fucking fuck." Stepping away from the row of old pay phones, Atkins' attention turns to every traveler coming and going from the airport. Every bag set idle by a metal bench, every security official chatting on their walkie. He wipes a hand over his brow, smearing sweat up into his hairline.
"Stupid fucking bitch," Atkins hisses, unable to think about anything other than Georgia Mayes' smug disapproval over the phone. Quickly snatching his backpack from the floor, Atkins makes a go for the front doors of the airport. He hustles past families gathering for flights, rushes past several security officers surveying a minivan that just arrived at the drop off area. When he steps out into the warm summer air, Atkins swallows down bile building in the back of his throat. As he looks, helplessly, up and down the street he realizes just how alone he is in this moment. As a last resort he fishes a burner cell phone out of his backpack, striding to the curb as he slots in a sim card and calls the only number stored in the phone.
"Oh my bloody fuck if you don't pick up the fucking phone…" Atkins hisses as he paces back and forth. The click on the other end has his stomach churning in knots. "Don't fucking hang up." He blurts into the phone, storming down the sidewalk past rows of cars unloading people and luggage. "No, I'm in fucking Moscow! They rerouted my fucking jet, something about flight identification mis-managed some-fucking I don't know! They're holding the plane for 24 hours and I'm fucking stranded here and I—I feel like there's eyes on my fucking back."
Stopping at the edge of the curb, Atkins realizes he doesn't even know where he's walking. "No, no." He firmly growls into the phone. "Listen here, if I get picked up by some KGB fucking shitstain I'm going to throw you so far under the bus you'll—" Atkins cuts off when an gloved hand claps around his mouth, hauling him back towards a gray van. He screams, muffled by the hand as his assailant grabs the phone out of his hand, passing it off to someone sitting by a laptop inside the van.
The figure dragging Atkins into the van twists one of his arms behind his back, eliciting a muffled scream as he's forced onto his stomach and zip-tied. Atkins' attacker slides the van door shut, then turns to a driver Atkins can't quite make out from the floor. "Go!" He yells to the driver, pressing a knee into Atkins back.
"Morgan Atkins," the square-jawed man says in a surprisingly American accent. "You have a new flight to catch."
