“Welcome to your new interface, Terra.” Neiman’s face smiled back at her when she came to.
Anger flooded through Terra when she awoke again and had prepared to talk his ear off about the unfairness of turning her off whenever it was convenient for him but she wasn’t fast enough before he started talking again.
“Before you start yelling at me, please note this is a recording and I’m not actually here,” He began. “If you truly are that girl stuck in a robot’s body, I went ahead and prepared an interface more user-friendly for you. Because the robots we create in this lab are all produced using code, it would be difficult to truly access all the benefits of being in a robot’s body if you aren’t programmed to already know. I made this video as a quick tutorial and you can ask me any other questions when you wake up.
“To the top right of your vision, you should see a small bubble. If you glance up at that, a menu should pop up about what kind of vision you would like. There are options like the typical night and infrared, but I created a fun one called ‘Dreamscape’ where the program will randomly generate colors and patterns and match them to surfaces it can identify. There are other boring ones but you can play with those yourself since I don’t want to talk about them.
“Down in the top left corner there are the vital records. Even though you’ve already been able to somehow interpret the vital signs of the life around you, this will give you a list of all the important life signs of anything in your sight. The color green means the data is a hundred percent correct while red means there could be an error somewhere. It will also help identify any figured behind you since the prototype has sensors all over and can sense anything from about a hundred meters away.
“When you get awakened you’ll be testing out our newest tracking feature too. In a hidden slot in your right upper arm and thigh are tracker storages. You have a total of twenty trackers, ten and ten, that automatically turn on the instant you remove them from their casing. There are buttons on them as well if you give them to an ally and they need assistance, relaying the message to you that they need help. The main reason I’m telling you this is because things have been set in motion and a tracker has already been placed, so don’t be alarmed when you get the notification.
“I didn’t think I’d have to act this quickly but GreenHouse has made the first move and I can’t let my queen be taken. When you wake up I’ll give you more details about our plan, but the current goal is to move as quickly as possible and rescue Indo and Petri and get to Onto since there’s an abandoned robotics lab hidden amongst storage containers. I planted a tracker on the vials with the Ambrosia since I can’t tell you who’s carrying them since you probably won’t want to go to Onto if you know who it is. Oh! I went ahead and removed the limiter word since it’ll get complicated if the people around you keep saying ‘Ambrosia.’
“Anyway, please don’t punch me when you see me since I won’t be able to stop you this time. I swear I’m not trying to hurt you and if everything goes to plan we’ll be able to get you your body back, even though I won’t really know what to do with it when we do but I’m sure you’ll feel better when you have it. So please, please, please don’t hit me when you wake up. I’m really sorry about constantly putting you to sleep but I swear this last time was the last time.”
Neiman gave her the biggest smile he could and pressed his palms together to ask for forgiveness.
“Again, I’m not young, so you might break something if you hit me.”
Terra’s mind was swimming with information when the old man’s face flickered out of her vision and a dark lab greeted her. She was partially prepared to see his smiling old face since it had practically become a habit at that point and he had pretty much promised her further explanations when fully awoke, but there was no spectacled man waiting to meet her. In fact, there was nobody directly in front of her although she could make out the silhouettes of seven figures near the lab entrance, three of which she could tell were robots. Testing out her newest vision features, she switched the setting to ‘Night’ and a pale blue filter fell over the darkness, letting her make out her surroundings. Which was when she saw the body on the ground to her left.
At first, Terra couldn’t quite process why someone was lying down on the ground in the dark so her mind immediately thought the person was sleeping, but the vitality monitor in her vision gave her a solid green reading of someone without a pulse.
“Our sleeping beauty awakens!” A voice called out to her, startling Terra out of her staring contest at the dead body.
When she turned she could identify Creedus immediately but had no idea who the three Patrollers pointing their guns at her were. Even though she should have been threatened by the presence of the seven figures grouped tightly less than twenty feet from her, she was more focused on the figure lying on the ground.
Images of Roger flashed in her mind as she knelt by the frail figure and she was surprised by the sudden nostalgia--she hadn’t thought about Roger in what seemed like ages, but the pool of blood that slicked Terra’s knees and palms as she got down on the ground triggered the memories.
Neiman looked peaceful as if he had simply laid down on the cold lab floor and decided to take a quick nap. Terra was confused as to how she had just seen him fine and well only a few moments ago, from both the recording and from right before she had been turned off, and now he was dead on the ground. She hadn’t been his biggest fan or anything but it was disconcerting how he looked as if at any moment he would jump up and tell her he was just messing with her and then run more tests.
“Seriously? You’re ignoring the people who have weapons?” Creedus asked in disbelief.
Terra turned her head to face the person she had just seen a few moments ago excitedly explaining to her about the strange powder the team had removed from her old body. What was going on?
“Please cooperate with us or we’ll have to use force. And these Combatants are the same model as you, so don’t think about trying to fight back. Well, you were supposed to be a prototype, but GreenHouse was already working on the newest model even before Neiman came back. They don’t--didn’t--trust him very much.”
Terra’s mind was reeling. Only ten minutes ago her time she was in the brightly-lit lab room with the small crowd of eager roboticists inquiring about black crystals and trying to find the answers to the universe and Neiman apologizing about turning her off, and now Neiman was dead and Creedus was involved with the people who killed him? Terra was so fed up with always playing catch-up with the events happening around her; why couldn’t everything be straightforward so she didn’t have to keep guessing with what going on all the time?
Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site.
She rose to her feet and faced the hostiles in front of her. The Patrollers were still holding their guns level at her but Terra knew bullets would have no effect on her. The Combatants at the human’s sides concerned her since they did look more formidable than any others she had seen before. Like her, there were no exposed wires or interior structure as Illicon coated their entire metallic bodies, meaning that they could prove to be tough to break if she needed to fight them.
“Why is Neiman dead?” She bluntly asked.
“My superiors noticed odd behavior coming from him so I was told to keep close tabs on him. He didn’t even suspect me the poor guy. Anywho, he planted a bunch of explosives and blew up three buildings so far and stole some important samples or something, so he had to be dealt with.”
“Wait, what? Neiman bombed three buildings? Neiman?” Terra asked, flabbergasted. Who knew the old man had it in him? She felt like laughing since it was so ridiculous to think of that old man with the large glasses and the smile planting bombs like they were flowers and setting them off.
“I know, right? I thought my bosses were just being super paranoid but now I’m in a shit-ton of trouble since he planted the explosives under my eye and caused millions of credits worth of damage. So it was him or me. And now it’s you or me, and you know I’m going to chose me, so I’d much rather prefer you coming with us peacefully but I’m not afraid of getting my hands a little dirty if I have to. Your choice.” Creedus said smugly with a gleam in his eye.
“Tempting offer, but I have to pass,” Terra stated.
“Well, I tried,” Creedus returned and motioned for the Combatants to move forward.
Terra waited a few seconds as the robots got closer of their own accord before jumping into action. Neiman had turned her off by switching something in the back of her head so she was betting on the fact there may have been something similar implanted on these Combatants. Unfortunately, these robots were just as fast as her and one of them caught her in her torso while she was in thought.
Terra flew back a few feet and had to use her hand to balance herself in a crouch before turning her attention to the bots again, and that was all the time it took for another one of the Combatants to land a hit to her knee while another circled around and pinned one of her arms behind her. To her shock, within the span of a second Terra was already disabled.
“They were made specifically with you in mind,” Creedus said while walking towards her. “Up until now, there’d been no reason to improve Combatants since there was no threat the current model couldn’t handle. Once you came along, the other robot’s teams finally had a purpose in life and got to have fun adding new improvements to the program and making the body itself sturdy enough to withstand attacks made by you. It didn’t even matter that you got a special new body since everyone else did too.”
Terra was still too surprised to comment back. To her memory, there wasn’t a battle she hadn’t lost. Well, besides that Alter monster ages ago, but that was two lifetimes ago and seemed irrelevant at the moment. She chastised herself for getting too cocky and not focusing all her attention on the improved robots and tried to look around for some sort of opening, but with all three Combatants pinning her to the ground there was no way for her to gain leverage to break away.
Fear finally started setting in and she tried to struggle away from the robots holding her, causing Creedus to break out in laughter.
“You never stop do you?” He turned to the Patrollers near him. “Turn her off so we can bring her to the main lab.”
With the snide smile gone Creedus turned on his heels as the three Patrollers cautiously approached Terra with their guns still raised. Terra struggled harder as they got closer. There was no way she was getting turned off again!
The sound of glass shattering from the back of the lab caused the Patrollers to nearly jump out of their skins and they shot into the darkness. A cloud of black dust flew directly at Terra and before she could react the cloud reformed into a dense mass and then dropped to floor in front of her. The Patrollers looked like they all wanted to shit themselves and leaped away from the object on the floor but Terra knew what it was.
Seizing her chance, she ripped herself away from the Combatant gripping her arm and punched out the knee of the one holding her shoulder in place, giving her enough time to grab the black crystal at her knees. Not completely sure if it would respond to her she swung out to the robot who had still kept a solid grip on her left leg.
At first, Terra didn’t think she had managed to turn the crystal into a sword since the Combatant was still standing there gripping her leg, but she could clearly see the black sword in her hand, so then she worried that even the crystal couldn’t cut through Illicon. Her hoped were lifted as the robot’s body slowly slid apart at the torso, revealing a clean cut through the entire system.
If Terra could smile, she would have been grinning ear to ear. She quickly turned and swung at the two other Combatants, effectively ending their reign over her--it felt good to win. When they both fell, however, she noticed one of them holding a robotic arm in their grasp and it took a moment for her to register that when she’d broken free from the Combatant pinning her arm to her back, she had literally ripped her arm from its metal socket.
Not entirely sure what to do, Terra grabbed her arm from the other robot’s grip and held onto it awkwardly since now she was having to carry a sword and an arm. Fumbling with her arm she noticed that the Patrollers were long gone, one of them even leaving behind his gun.
Terra tried grabbing the gun too but couldn’t carry three things so she opted for trying to find some sort of bag to put everything in. The elation she had felt from winning a fight she was sure to lose if not for the help of the crystal wore off when she saw Neiman’s body laying a few feet away.
“Oh, dear. I appear to have died.”
Terra jumped at Neiman’s voice and whipped her head around trying to find its source.
“Calm down, I installed an AI program that I’ve been working on for decades. I had a lot of time in retirement to play around so I created it. Good thing too since I guess I died before I could really do anything in my plan. Speaking of, you should probably grab those bags over there and get a move on since those Patrollers will be coming back with more Combatants. Cool sword by the way.”
Terra was at a loss for words so she just did what the voice in her head told her to.
“Oh, and search my pockets since I’ve still got a few more buttons to press.”
“You want me to search through a dead man’s pockets?” Terra asked incredulously.
“It is my body.”
“Yeah, and mine is in a tube somewhere but I don’t see anyone digging around in my pockets.”
“Believe me, the scientists have dug around in your genetics rather than your pockets, and I’m at least giving you my consent.”
She didn’t want to argue anymore with the discombobulated voice in her head so she quickly stuck her hand in Neiman’s pockets until she heard the sound of metal against plastic and she carefully drew out a handful of switches and dropped them into one of the bags along with her detached arm.
“Alright then, let’s get this show on the road!” Neiman’s voice cheerfully said. “Let’s go rescue Indo and Petri and get you your body back!”