So the first thing you need to know is that all the rumors are true: there was a soylent green filtration control, the virus wasn't actually invented by the digital bitch, we had to play a holochess game to open a door, TriOp had made their own mutants before everything went downhill even before Diego's little biological hobby was stolen and refined. The transport did arrive stuffed to the hatch with enough Tri-Credits and wargear to start a freaking revolution. That's probably why they're still going crazy trying to find him - even while the courts are ripping their precious company apart like a food wrapper.
And yes...the Hacker found me in a rest station. That's true, too.
What's wrong? Why aren't you laughing? Isn't it FUNNY, the idea of cowering in a tiny space-potty with a useless little gun you're holding like a teddy bear? It's like right out of one of those cartoons they roll out every few months. Darkened hallways, shambling monsters all around and a mad scientist bent on world domination, the works. Such a dead-horse cliche plot by now - right? The ones that everyone points and laughs because we've all seen enough crappily-rendered, shittily-written CGI shows of that.
Except it really happened. I was there; the poor schmuck hiding behind a flimsy little door at the end of a dark hallway. Waiting to choose between spending my last bullet on a monster or myself so I wouldn't get blown open by a robot or ripped apart and eaten by some horrible thing out of a nightmare come alive. The day before I tripped over someone's bloody skull and busted my nose on the deck plating. I'm sure that would be a big yuck-yuck to watch, right? "Oooh, he faw down go boom!" What a classic! Oh - but let's not forget - the mad scientist nearly burned your whole city and ruled the world for real. But hey, go on, why don't you...
laugh
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I'd been hiding with the group in the Medical level up until that point. From what we've been able to piece together, they were the second to last group to fall. The handful on the Flight Deck survived were the last. We took advantage of the layout of that level to hide behind a 'moat' made by breaking a forcefield.
My memory of that time is a bit hazy and I like it that way. We weren't overrun by hostiles, the one small mercy we had. What finally got us was a combination of running out of food and water and just being trapped with nowhere to run for longer than our minds could handle it. There's something about being cornered that gets to you as it drags on for days with no help in sight. Only a couple of us had ever fired a weapon in our lives; none of us were soldiers or had any kind of mental fortitude for the hell we were enduring. Our sleep cycles were ruined between stress and sleeping on hard floor panels with one tiny blanket. People started snapping at each other out of boredom. I know that probably sounds stupid - imagine being bored at a time like that, right? But it turns out that you still need something to occupy the hours that you spend shuffling back and forth between the borders of your communal jail.
At one point there was a full fledged expedition with everyone who could walk and every gun we could find. A couple pistols and one janky Sparq. Just to make it to the common room to grab a laptop or some books. To have literally anything to do besides stare at each other with eyes that had run out of tears a week ago.
When the point man took one peek around the corner and signaled that there were too many hostiles ahead, one lady just plain lost it. Ran straight through the place to grab a PDA off the table. The last we saw of her was going around the corner with four zombies hot on her tail. I guess she hoped to lose them and get back to us later.
Of course...she never made it back. For that matter, after the rest of us shuffled back 'home' was when the final mental spirals started happening. What was that old saying - the tray that broke the Serv-Bot's back?
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Up until that point all I'd found were bodies. Messy bodies.
I'm not such a baby that I'd never seen a corpse before. But they'd always been either a nice prettied up thing on a morgue slab or on some screen in a newscast. Most jobs don't usually have you coming up on the shredded remains of someone on the floor with their rotting guts spilled out. I was still cloudy in the head from waking up, limping around looking for anyone. The true scale of the problem hadn't hit me yet.
When I opened that rest station door neither of us could do more but stare at each other. He looked up at me...almost like a kicked puppy. Brown eyes that said "I've seen awful things" with a thousand-yard gaze. He says I looked like I was coming off a weekend drug bender where I got a bunch of implants while I'd been stoned out of my CPU.
The first thing I said was could I switch places with him for a minute. My body was starting to try to flush out all the foreign substances along with accumulated natural waste. I'd been dreading the thought of having to shit in a bucket or something equally degrading while also trying not to die violently. It never occurred to me not to trust a random stranger until after he was reloading the clip for his MiniPistol from loose rounds I gave him while my butt did a good imitation of an earthshaker charge. Maybe some non-verbal cues I didn't consciously notice let me know I could trust him. The documentation for the R-grade implants doesn't say anything about being able to interpret the body language of someone or deduce their mental state. But I'd bet a hundred credits Trioptimum put in something.
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"Anyone else?"
"Not on this deck."
"You any good with that thing?"
A guilty glance down at the gun was all the answer he needed. "Give it here. I have stabilizing and aim-assist implants. Every bullet needs to count. Take that Sparqbeam and be careful where you point it. Don't get in my way. They gave me implants but I'm not trained either, we'll both be learning on the fly."
They switched armaments without protest. "A charge station is around the corner by a pillar. But it's exposed as hell. One of those snipers nearly took my head off."
"Just great. You know hand signals? The cyber-bitch in charge has eyes AND ears everywhere so the less we say out loud the better. Internal comms are all down too."
The brown-eyed man did a few motions in sequence. "Just what I remember from playing X-Command 5."
"Wait, you too?"
"Yeah. How often?"
Suddenly the two strangers became comrades in arms, after an odd fashion. "Shit...maybe...a couple times every week at the arcade?"
"Daily for me. Usually. I have my own VR headset back in my habitat." He flared his right hand, displayed a single finger, then pointed his thumb up. "Stop, number of targets, point up for high and down for low. More than 5 hostiles and - "
"And we fucking run away." emphasized his heavily-augmented new friend. "Because we are outnumbered, outgunned, and I seriously doubt we are getting any reinforcements."
"...right."
"So what happened here? Did Diego take the place over? Why kill everyone? So he can run the place by himself?"
"What? Diego? He's one of the suits, isn't he? Man, he isn't running shit, all the suits ran and hid in one of the Groves. I hope they all got turned into zombies. It's SHODAN. She took over the whole station."
A moment of silence passed in mutually shared horror, broken by a warbling growl from somewhere not far enough away. One man who stood limply after weeks of waking terror, the other leaning against the wall as the true magnitude of the danger suddenly became crystal clear.
"She runs all the robots."
This horrified statement barely prompted a sigh from the unaugmented man. "Yep, big and small, they're all running MurderOS, if you get what I mean."
"She runs all the station weapons."
"Which is probably why nobody's landed since shit hit the fan. It would take an entire fleet to have a hope of breaking through those laser and missile batteries. So our glorious leaders in Sub-Optimum made an unassailable fortress of doom in outer space and SHODAN just pulled up the drawbridge on them."
The hacker's cyber-rig flashed a warning into his mind: Audio alert - unknown life form
"Shit," he whispered. "Drones."
"Fall back to the hallway on your left," hissed his companion immediately, bracing for a sprint. "Implants or no implants this hall is a dead end, and so are we if we get cornered. 3-2-1...GO!"