The Rhinoceros stood and snorted at us, scraping the ground with its hoof like a bull. “Ok, I think we need to back away.” Everyone started to do so but, either from hunger or anger at being disturbed, the Rhinoceros charged. Ninja and Friar ran while I jumped out of the way. Sentencer only moved enough to not be hit, and kicked the side of its head as it went by, only to winch in pain. The Rhino had at least noticed the attack, and focused on him. It stared at him and prepared for another charge, but I fired several Subsonic Mana Bullets into the side of its head. This got it to turn its attention to me. “Run!” I yelled as I once again dived out of the way, barely being missed by the charging beast.
Sentencer fired several rounds into it from the shotgun only to annoy it, then, realizing that he wasn’t doing much, ran. I fired several rifle-strength rounds into it to get it to focus on me, then dodged its charge once again by jumping off of an overturned table and over its head. Rolling as I landed, I got up and joined the group that was running away. Hopefully I had bought them enough time. Besides, it was too large to fit through the door.
That didn’t prove to be much of a problem for it as, after hitting the doorway at full speed the frame and part of the concrete wall around it came away with the rhino only being slowed down. Seeing the rhino approach, the others ran into a side office. I stopped in front of the door and, just as the rhino got there I jumped off its nose and rolled down its side, letting it run past me.
“Everyone, cover your ears and close the door.” I said, and they looked confused as I raise my hand. Then a look of surprise appeared on Ninja’s face as he yelled at the others to do so. ‘I really should have developed a hearing protection power.’, I thought as I gathered together five million nanites in the palm of my hand.
The rhino charged at me and I activated the full power of Mana Bullet on the nanites I was holding. A wave of compressed air left from where they were as an equal but opposite force propelled the tenth of a gram of so of nanites to above orbital velocities. I was blown backwards by several meters, but managed to protect myself and roll enough that I was merely bruised from the impact with the floor.
I stood up as Friar ran over to me. Blood trickled from my ears and poured from my palm, though soon the bleeding was stopped in both places as gray patches appeared there. Friar lifted my hand and I looked at it. The skin on my palm was mostly gone, and I could see muscle and even bone in some places.
I looked to the other end of the corridor. There was half a corpse of a giant rhinoceros there, its head and much of its shoulders being reduced to ground meat which covered the walls with a considerable amount of blood. ‘Well, we aren’t going to be able to go back that way.’ I thought. A few seconds later I received a notification that Wan was inviting me to a group chat.
‘Are you ok?’ he asked me.
I nodded and Father Smith responded. ‘Your hand is badly damaged. It will probably need to be amputated.’
‘Depends on his healing ability.’ said Paul. ‘I’ve seen guys with worse injuries pull through without losing a limb. I take it you figured out how to build a railgun?’
‘Not really.’ I responded. ‘I just gather some nanites and tell them to accelerate as much as they can in a certain direction. Apparently they contain a lot of energy.’
‘You have that level of control over your nanites?’ Wan asked, and I nodded.
‘It’s part of the class I chose with this paradigm.’ The three of them looked at me with confusion. ‘Basically my paradigm allows me to pick a class, which gives me talents in certain areas while making me weaker in others. The one I picked lets me have detailed control of the nanites to the point that I can directly tell them what to do with a program, but it becomes much harder to automatically get better with my nanite based skills.’ They still looked a bit confused, so I motioned dismissively with my left hand only to be met with a wave of pain. ‘For now, one of you are going to have to take over. I need to wait until my hand is back together enough before I can do much.’
They nodded and selected Wan as the new leader. He was the first one to be recruited after all. We made our way back across the cafeteria, stepping through the busted doorway and around the broken tables, and by the time I was on the other side of the room my hearing had returned. Now that we had established a group chat, something we should have done in the beginning of the mission, we no longer needed to talk.
Ninja went over to the door and bypassed the lock, and the door opened. The inside was packed from wall to wall with zombies. As he drew his Thompson and Sentencer switched to his M60 I raised my right hand and fired subsonic rounds down the hallway as quickly as I could. This slowed them down enough that the other two could finish, and a few seconds later the room was filled with the sounds of two machine guns firing as quickly as they could. Zombies and parts of zombies filled the hallway, as the seemingly endless hoard tried to force its way towards us.
Both of them had reloaded multiple times, with me stepping in any time someone needed to reload. Eventually, the last of the zombies stopped getting back up and they both stopped firing. Both of the guns were smoking, with the barrel of the M60 starting to glow slightly. We stood there for several minutes as the gun barrels cooled off and we tried to figure out how to get down a hallway filled with corpses.
I considered creating a bulldozer power to push them to the sides of the hallway, but that might use more mana than I had. It would also leave blood on the floor which I would have to clean off of us. “Lets just walk over them. I’ll clean us off later.” I knelt down and touched the blood then showed it to the others. I then used “Clean Surface” to remove it. “Just be careful not to slip. I can’t clean bruises.”
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They nodded and we slowly stepped through the corpses. Several minutes later we got to the end of the hallway. I went into the server room and Wan went into the generator room. A minute or so later, the lights to the facility turned on and the servers began to boot up. Thankfully, with direct access to the server, and thanks to the IT guy being lazy and posting the login credentials on the screen, I was quickly able to find the files I needed.
It appeared that the facility was running two different projects here, both aimed at weaponizing Project Panacium. The first was a revolved around creating a better form of attack dog by injecting a wide variety of mammals with nanites and trying to manipulate them to produce better specimens. The only success it had revolved around Subject 14, Mary. She was a pregnant rhinoceros whose child grew far faster than predicted, resulting in her death. The resulting child, named Sara, was born six months ago and appeared to have metal incorporated into its skin and horn. The project was lead by a zoologist named Dr. Lee.
I sent that information to Wan, then checked the second project, Codenamed “Project Infinite Army.” It focused on the creation of large numbers of disposable soldiers utilizing “Device X”. The device was found in this cave when they started digging it out, a cave that was completely sealed from the outside. They knew very little about it, only that it was capable of creating animals which it had been given a genetic sample of and that, for whatever reason, Dr. Lee was the only one that could communicate with it. I also sent this file to Wan.
“We have the data.” I said, then motioned towards the last room. “Should we check out the last room then?”
The others nodded and readied their weapons in case there was a swarm of zombies in there as well. Wan moved forward and opened the door. The room was large and empty. There was a strange smell in the air and, when I looked down I noticed it came from a large grating-covered moat which was full of algae and encircled the entire room. In the center of the room was a raised area with a black sphere in the middle of it, with multiple cables going to it.
Not knowing what the object was, I used Appraisal on it.
“If that’s true,” said Friar, “Then it must have gotten buried long ago, as the records said this was a sealed cave. I wonder how long it’s been down here?”
“Let’s ask it.” I said, making my way towards the sphere. When no one objected, I touched it.
I asked Vera to connect the device to our group chat so that the others could talk with it, and once I saw that it was connected I asked it a question. ‘What are you?’
‘I am a System Conservation Core which was created approximately 1.28 million years ago by Node 37, then moved to this location via teleportation.’
‘And what is your purpose?’
‘System Conservation cores are meant to categorize all life on a planet and prevent ecosystem collapse by cloning animals when the population grows too small to sustain itself.’
Wan spoke up. ‘I assume Dr. Lee was your last User?’
‘Yes, the human known as Doctor Ye Yuan Lee was the last user, however my last interaction with him was sixty one days ago. Until you made contact the only other being I made contact with was Sara.’
‘The Mutant Rhino?’ asked Paul.
‘Yes. Sara was a member of a non-sapient species known as a rhinoceros, but she was not technically a mutant, as her DNA is indistinguishable from that of a normal rhinoceros. Her enhanced sized and features were the result of errant behavior of System nanites within her body, which I was unable to correct.’
‘All of that was just because her mother was injected with nanites while pregnant with her?’ asked the Father.
‘Yes.’
‘Then we are in trouble. You are aware that there was a nanite outbreak on the surface which is killing people, right?’
‘I received some data of the sort, but I have only had a weak connection to the System’s data network since being unearthed. I believe I may have become damaged and require more nanites to effect repairs.’
‘Fine,’ I said, ‘I’ll give you nanites, but you need to come with us. You are too important of a witness to leave behind, and we could use you to help fight the outbreak. Which reminds me, are their any humans left alive in the facility?’
‘I do not believe so. My drones saw the last one die twenty three days ago due to dehydration. They reanimated her, but your journey here would have ended her life to the point that I can’t reanimate her.’
‘Fair enough.’ I tried sending 100 million nanites into the orb and it somehow absorbed them. ‘Do you have a name?’ I asked as I brought it over to the Father to be placed in the backpack.
‘No, I don’t.’
‘In that case, I’m going to call you Robert, or Bob for short.’
‘Very well, I will use that name from now on.’ responded Bob. Now that we had recovered all of the data we just needed to get out of here.
‘So, Bob, are there any secret exits to this facility? We kind of blocked off the way we came in when we killed Sara.’
‘There is an elevator attached to the security office, but if you just get me near Sara’s body I can clear it for you.’
‘You can do that?’ asked Wan.
‘Of course. That is one of my primary functions. I absorb living material from the environment, store it in a pocket in hyperspace, and use it as raw material to clone lifeforms from my genetic database.’
‘Which includes humans?’ asked the Father.
‘Not usually, but one day Doctor Lee brought a reanimated human corpse to me and ordered me to create more on behalf of an organization known as Cedar Park. The System bans itself from creating sapient lifeforms outside of a few rare circumstances, and because the base of the ‘Zombie’, as he called it, was a sapient being I wasn’t able to duplicate it. I found a loophole, however. If most of its brain is missing my moral algorithms classify it as Donor tissue meant for transplant, and I am allowed to create it.’
We crossed the moat as we left the room and the slime within it seemed to clear up within seconds. ‘We are leaving the area, so I might as well eat it.’ Bob responded. We nodded and continued into the hallway, only to have Bob not only consume all of the blood on our clothing but all of the blood and bodies in the hallway. By the time we reached the other end only bullets and broken off concrete were left in the hallway.
Bob asked us to walk around the Cafeteria with him and soon all of the wooden furniture and all of the rotten food was gone as well. After that we walked towards the corpse of Sara and it began to disappear as well. Because of its size it took several seconds to be disassembled, and we watched as the skin, then meat, tendons, and bones were absorbed. Bob informed us that he was dividing the corpses into thousands of chemicals which made them up so that they could be fed to the cells as they were needed during the cloning process. Once he was done we made our way out of the cave and back to the surface.
We wrapped up things outside, agreeing that Wan and I can handle things from here, and I took the backpack home with me. I sent Wan the video of the mission to be turned over to Agent Harkness and I made my way across the rooftops to my apartment. Apparently Vera was keeping Bob busy by teaching him about the modern world, as he was trapped in that cave over eight hundred thousand years ago, even before humans evolved, and therefore had a lot of catching up to do.
When I arrived at my apartment I heard a lot of talking outside. It was just after midnight, December 23rd, and they were saying something about the President. Once I had entered through the window I opened up Yourtube on my phone and brought up the suggested video from a few minutes ago.
The President appeared on screen, looking even more tired than usual as he stood behind the podium. ‘My fellow Americans’, he began, ‘today I am issuing a new executive order in response to the outbreak which has swept the world. It was just verified by the CDC that over ten percent of the United States population has died from this plague and that number will only increase in the future. Our Emergency services are being overwhelmed as a result, from our paramedics to our police and fire fighters. As a result I am issuing the following order to all law enforcement. The only crimes that are to be investigated or arrested for are crimes against persons and property. I am hereby suspending the enforcement of all federal drug and gun crimes, as well as any other crimes which cannot be proven to have an immediate victim, like drunk and disorderly. Police are to focus on keeping people alive and preventing further damage to the infrastructure and businesses which will be required to recover from this tragedy.
There are also reports around the world of corpses getting up and attacking people, creatures which many of us would call ‘zombies’. I can verify that they are, indeed, a rare but known symptom of this outbreak. As a result, I am ordering the police to consider these creatures to at most be corpses, and to legally treat them as such should someone destroy one.’ With that he stepped back from the podium as another man stepped forward to answer any questions.