Without comment, Yanny placed the stuffed llama Abigail had given her a few weeks ago on the large table in the meeting room. The assembled group looked at her questioningly. Given the seriousness of the situation, no one had expected her to bring the stuffed animal to the meeting.
"Does it still need to be walked?" asked Ralph with a broad grin. Yanny smiled, but didn't answer, just snapped her fingers.
"Llama, right!" she ordered her stuffed animal. Much to the surprise of the others, the little legs began to move and the llama actually turned to the right. Yuri, who had just finished his Coke, slowly closed his mouth and put the cup down in front of him.
"Llama, left!" she ordered, the llama followed without hesitation and turned left.
"Llama, jump." The llama jumped forward a little, but the movement looked awkward. The artificial animal staggered as it landed, but managed to regain its balance and avoid falling over.
"Fascinating," Harry said, genuinely impressed. Everyone stared at the stuffed animal; no one had expected such an introduction.
"I only wish Anton were so obedient," Yuri said, looking reproachfully over at his dog, curled up in an armchair under the window, snoring softly. He had put on a little weight lately. Anton had been living in the villa like a little dog king since the agents had freed him from his cage in the subway shafts, escaping certain death from radioactive contamination.
"That's not all," Yanny giggled, seeming to have forgotten all her worries for the moment, and patted the llama's head, which seemed to be waiting attentively for her next instructions.
"What's next?" Ralph groaned, then shoved a few peanuts into his mouth from the plastic bowl that was always well-filled on the table at every meeting.
"Llama, dance!" Yanny commanded, and the llama began to dance, twirling its short little legs and wiggling its butt, while its facial expression maintained the stoic seriousness with the slight silver look. Everyone laughed - including Abigail - wondering if Yanny hadn't wasted too much time on these little *extras* in the program. Still, it was a welcome break before they got to the unpleasant part. She took a good swig from her whiskey glass to calm herself down, a tried and true home remedy she had learned from Ralph.
"Llama, sing!" came the next command. The stuffed animal continued to dance in rhythmic samba movements and suddenly began to moo loudly and clearly like a cow. Abigail laughed so hard that the sip of whiskey she still had in her mouth shot out of her nose.
"Yanny, damn it... Llamas don't moo!" she giggled helplessly as she fished a handkerchief from the desk drawer and blew her stinging nose.
"They do!" Yanny said with a slightly offended undertone and gave her an uncertain look. "Or... Don't they?"
"No, they don't," Abigail confirmed, blowing her nose. Yanny rubbed her chin and thought; there was no information about them in her databases. "But what sounds do they make?"
"I ate one once, but I never heard one," Ralph explained, smacking his lips and shoving another handful of nuts into his mouth.
"You what?" Harry asked.
"That creature escaped from Elysium Zoo and got lost in the northern part of the city, old story... I'll tell it some other time. Anyway, it was a bit chewy," Ralph said with a laugh.
"The... well, llamas just kind of hum... and whinny. But not like horses..." Abigail tried to explain. Confused looks were directed at her.
"Humming? Whinnying?" Abigail blushed slightly as she tried to rub her pant legs dry with a second handkerchief. "Why are you looking at me like that? It's really hard to describe. They just hum like... like llamas."
"And mine is mooing!" Yanny affirmed firmly, crossing her arms over her chest to add weight to her statement. "I upgraded it with all kinds of technology I got from a thrift store downtown. By the way, for some reason I don't understand, there was a second unused motherboard with a relatively powerful processor hidden in the Sea Lord's computer, which I installed in Lama's stomach and which now provides the little one with computing power. These processors are perfectly adequate for his needs," Yanny explained. Abigail rubbed the bridge of her nose and sighed. What the cyborg here describes as *adequate* might be worth about $100,000.00 on the black market. "Lama's skeleton and the rest of the hardware are made of the same material as my reconstructed hand. Two miniature cameras are built into its eyes to give it three-dimensional vision. I've wired the ears with two microphones." She pulled out a wide wristband that looked a lot like her own. A small mini-screen was built into it. "This bracelet is connected to Llama. It will follow me during the battle with Lazarus and give you status reports. There is not enough power to transmit images and sound, but it will certainly provide interim information. My own status will also be displayed on this screen.
"A drone, then," Harry said.
"Exactly," Yanny confirmed with a smile. She activated the wristband, and next to the square text message field appeared a menu with a stick figure whose individual body parts lit up in green 100 percent lettering. "This is an extremely simplified representation of me," she explained proudly, and the llama mooed softly in confirmation.
"Okay, and what can we do, what is our role in this?" asked Harry. He was eager to find out what they could do to help Yanny in her upcoming battle. It would certainly be another daring action, he guessed. Whether in a factory hall, in a steel cage on a luxury yacht, in a subway shaft or in a virtual reality meta-dream... it made no difference to him where the next mission would take him. As long as the girl could avert the imminent danger and they could hopefully look forward to calmer times afterwards. He sighed at the thought and took a bite of the cereal bar he had just unwrapped. At least it was once again a just cause, once again for the entire city and its inhabitants, a not inconsiderable portion of whom he considered quite mad and not sane. But was that really his motivation? If he was honest with himself, he could only answer in the negative. No, it wasn't. Whatever was asked of him now, he would do it for her alone, for Yanny, of that he was sure. He had never been fit to be a *hero*, and until the founding of this agency, there had been nothing and no one he could have lost. No one who had meant anything to him. All that had changed.
Yuri grimaced slightly as he watched Harry eat the cereal bar. He preferred a completely different diet and would only have eaten these things if absolutely necessary. Next to him on the table were three empty burger boxes from Fabio Burger, four empty bags of chips and three empty cups of coke. The mayor himself had opened his first fast-food restaurant on North Beach two weeks ago, and Yuri had been eager to try out his delivery service. His muscular body demanded snacks to keep his strength up.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
"Harry's right, what we do?" he grumbled.
Abigail, now back at the large whiteboard with a thick marker, began to explain, writing down key points and making schematic drawings.
"Yanny was able to decipher some more important information over the net. There are also some old technology computers connected to the teletext Internet that have a connection technology that, as far as we know, cannot be reproduced anywhere on 86. This function probably dates back to the time when everything was installed on the settler ships and permanent communication between the individual units was completely normal. We were lucky that the Party Future Northlands operates a central computer with old technology, which enabled us to find out even more about Project Lazarus. With the help of our interface, Yanny was able to find out that the PFN has built its own underwater base about 30 kilometers off the coast of Elysium. It is a secret military project in which Utopia and Neo Yakutsk have participated. The reason why this base was built now seems clear: the party wanted to create an outpost in the south. What we now know for sure is that this Lazarus receives orders from there and is to some extent controlled from there. As we have already discovered, despite the implanted human brain and chip, it needs additional control to stay on course during its missions. In the documents and message histories, everything about the underwater outpost refers to something called *Base 2*. That's why we suspect that Base 1 is located in Neo Yakutsk - the place where the super soldier was created - and its radio link doesn't reach far enough to Elysium," Abigail explained in detail. Yuri wiped his mouth with a paper napkin and thought about it. Yes, it sounded very much like the PFN's strategic approach. He hadn't left Utopia for nothing, hadn't risked his life to escape military service for no reason. He had not wanted to be part of these great power fantasies. Until now, however, he had thought it unlikely that the northern cities would actually launch an act of war against the south, albeit a covert one, so quickly. Could it be that his past was catching up with him?
"And now you want to go to the base?" asked Ralph with raised eyebrows.
"Exactly. We'll infiltrate the base and manipulate the controls. That way we can at least destabilize Lazarus from there long enough for Yanny to destroy him. We can destabilize him by, for example, feeding him illogical commands while he fights her, which is why the whole thing has to happen at the same time. Yanny must fight him while we are at the controls. For example, if we command him to surrender, it will take some time for his self-preservation mechanism to kick in. Yanny can then use this window of opportunity to destroy him by force. If we create the moment of confusion too early or too late and they can't use the window of opportunity, Lazarus may become even more dangerous and unpredictable than before because he won't take orders for a while and may run amok," Abigail explained, trying to sound as calm as possible.
"Sounds... easy," Harry said with a sarcastic undertone in his voice, flicking the empty package of his bar onto the table. Yuri pursed his lips.
"Let me guess, we take little submarine we stole from Sea-Lord and take it to underwater base?" Abigail nodded, glancing briefly at Yanny, who was sitting quietly in the chair with Lama on her lap, who had crawled there on its own.
"Exactly. But there's a problem here, too. The submarine is only meant for short emergency trips to the coast. It has a range of 35 kilometers. So it would be a total of 60 kilometers to the base and back to the coast. We would make it to Base 2, of course, but not back.
"This is bad," grumbled the giant.
"Yes, but I've already thought of something. It... You might like it, Yuri..." Abigail interjected, smiling softly. He looked at her curiously.
"Gift for Yuri?"
"We only need to get within about five kilometers of the base to make it back completely on our own. And we know someone who has a ship that can do that easily. Carla Brandon could do us this favor, she promised us one back then anyway. Since we got Dennis Dexter out of the way, she's one of the most powerful people in Elysium and the Sea Lord belongs to her and is at her free disposal.
"We're going on another trip on Sea Lord?" Yuri asked, his features brightening.
"You can think about getting *her* something? She'll definitely still be working there," Abigail grinned, alluding to the stewardess named Lisa Muller with whom Yuri had tried in vain to flirt when he was drunk. He had mentioned Lisa again and again in the meantime, pretending it didn't bother him that he would probably never see her again. Lisa had mistaken Abigail for his wife the second time they had met on the ship and had left with a sour remark.
"By the way, the only way to get in without setting off the alarm is through the drainpipe at the bottom of the base," Yanny said in a somewhat muffled voice, and Abigail shook in disgust as she explained this particular detail. It would take a lot of effort for the computer specialist to enter through the sewer system of all places. At least she would be wearing an impermeable suit, that was her only consolation. "There must be a hole somewhere in the pipe, through which you can get into the interior of the base. Unfortunately, I haven't found an exact floor plan."
"Okay, so we take the ship out to sea, take our submarine the last part of the way, get into the base through the toilet drain, manipulate the controls for Lazarus while Yanny fights him, and while she's still destroying him, we're already on the run with the submarine back to land," Harry recapitulated, rubbing the bridge of his nose.
"Almost boring," Yuri remarked dryly.
"Well, when this is all over, we'll find a quieter job, folks. Maybe just driving trucks around with loads of nitroglycerin, or scrubbing the remaining radioactive caverns under Kelly Malcom's nuclear power plant..." Ralph grunted. Abigail cleared her throat at the mention of the contractor's name and began biting her fingernails.
"Whatever," she said quickly.