Eve’s choice of a new locale was in the industrial center of Neon Orleans. It looked like a freight shipping company that went under and no one had bothered to renovate it since, a common enough occurrence once Louisiana tired of giving lavish tax giveaways to industrial businesses.
The building was 3500 square feet of concrete and steel, divided up into four floors. Humandroids were busy mounting a sign that stated “Eve’s Humandroid Facility.” Mark gave her a quizzical look and she picked up his thoughts from their link.
“A power draw like the one you use in the house has a very distinctive signal. I’m assuming that whoever is after you has the money and resources to track that signal. We should also assume that the group after you has police and other government employees on their payroll, which means going to them for protection is iffy, not to mention that we don’t have any real proof of what actually happened outside from the assault. We have logs from the game, but without a physical human body to tie to the logs, it could be brushed off as a game event.”
Mark thought about how he’d heard stories where police set up stings years in advance just to make sure the case would stick. John “Teflon” Gotti was the most notorious, evading federal charges three times that should have landed him firmly in a prison cell.
“So what’s the plan here?” Mark replied.
“Simple. We manufacture our own humandroids to sell. We keep a specially selected batch to act as bodyguards for you. I can download all of my training into these models, so they’ll be effective at defending you. Obviously, the more training you undergo in the game and here, the better the training I can give them. To take part in that training, we’re making special MMA humandroids.”
Regular MMA had been subject to increasing rules and sanctions over time to reduce fighter injury rates. Several of the older sports purists wanted to see a return to the “Vale Tudo” days of “Anything goes.” Since humans were out of the question for that, humandroids were seen as a suitable replacement for that anything goes style. Of course, it wasn’t quite the same. Moves like fish-hooking a humandroid’s eye wouldn’t do anything, nor would trying to kick one in the junk.
The humandroids had to be built to human analogue standards even if more resilient fighting forms were available. Floating rib, solar plexus, liver, temple, the chin, and all of the other vulnerable spots had to have the same effect as on a human fighter. You couldn’t just send out a titanium tank into the field.
Humandroid fighters typically worked with human fighters. The human fighters would benefit from a training partner that they could go full force on without fear of injuring them, the humandroids learned from a highly adaptable opponent. It was a perfect win-win situation for everyone involved.
The first floor was clearly the training area. Heavy bags, free weights, speed bags, training ropes, and other equipment filled the area. The elevators to the rest of the floors were locked without proper personal credentials, a retina scan and a voice analysis test.
The second floor was the manufacturing area. Large 3d printers and molecular vats filled the area. The humandroids working on this floor reminded him of the exact setup he’d seen when he’d visited Cédric Rossignol. The more things changed.
The third floor was the living quarters. Each room looked identical to the others. A queen size bed, a closet, and a bathroom. There was a common kitchen and living room for entertainment.
The fourth and final floor was where his military-grade vat lay. The room was built like a gigantic panic room. Three steel doors could come out of the walls, sealing his vat off and creating an impenetrable barrier to his vat. Weapons, both legal and illegal, were hidden behind the back wall where his vat stood. Enough food and non-perishable goods filled the backroom to make it so he could probably survive a nuclear apocalypse.
“That’s very cool and all,” Mark began, “but why three metal doors? Wouldn’t one gigantic one be better? And how do I keep from getting trapped in here?” Eve smiled and pressed a button in the vats area. The room came apart at where each of the three floors were, opening out and letting them be rearranged.
“In the worst case scenario, the steel doors act like quarantine zones. Without them, someone could simply jump to the next floor down while the floors are being reassembled. This will move the back wall to the front. Unfortunately, the elevator won’t be there, so you’ll have to repel down the elevator shaft if that ever happens.”
Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.
“I’m just impressed at how fast it was all put together.” Mark said. A team of humans would have taken years to get this much infrastructure done. Eve smiled at that, but there was a touch of sadness to her.
“Humans have done several scenarios in which technology keeps accelerating. There’s only a few outcomes. The first outcome is organic life destroys itself via nuclear war or super germs or by destroying the environment. The second outcome is that organic life gets completely replaced by non-organic life. And the third outcome is that an alien species comes down to wipe out life on Earth. The only life form capable of space travel is going to be non organic. If humans traveled at 99 percent the speed of light, the radiation dose from hydrogen in space would be 61 sieverts per second. Just 6 sieverts of radiation once kills humans. Even assuming warp technology gets developed, the most likely beings that can survive the void of space for extended periods of time are non-organic. There’s non-organic creatures on several planets now, space roamers that are documenting the surface of mars and other planets. There are still no humans who have done so.”
Mark tried to think if he should be depressed about humans eventual extinction. It was hard to really care much about the fate of the species as a whole when he was being hunted by one set of humans that were trafficking other humans. “Man is a crooked branch from which no straight thing was ever carved.” Did that apply to humandroids as well?
Regardless, Mark couldn’t bring himself to care much about the eventual extinction of humanity any more than he could bring himself to care about the eventual supernova of the Sun. Even assuming Eve was right, the time table was far beyond when it’d matter to him.
“So, what’s the plan? I’m just going to jump back into the game?” Mark asked.
Eve shook her head. “No, that won’t work. You will need to change your regimen. When you go to sleep at night, you will log off every day. We’ll work on your physical body for two hours then have you finish sleeping in the vat tank. It accelerates healing time, so you don’t need as much sleep and it won’t take as long for you to recover. Your room is the farthest down the hall on the third floor. Get dressed and get ready.”
Mark did exactly as he was asked. After he finished dressing in work out clothes, he went to the first floor. There, another humandroid came up. This one was an unskinned model, which looked both cool and unnerving in one. The workout consisted of three minute rounds with thirty second breaks. The first five rounds were focus mitt and thai pad work. Then three rounds of clinch work and two rounds of sparring. Then ten more rounds of hitting various heavy bags, banana bags, uppercut bags, striking bags, and speed bags. The next hour involved calisthenics, plyometrics, rope work, kettlebells, and weighted sled runs.
At the end of it, Mark just lay in a big pool of sweat. He hadn’t worked out this hard at the police academy, much less voluntarily at any other point in his life. Eve walked up to him.
“I get to look forward to doing this every day,” he said weakly.
“Come on”, she said, nudging him with her foot. “You got to drink a recovery shake and then we’re putting you in the tank.”
“I think I’ll just lay here and die,” Mark replied. Eve grabbed one of his legs and rolled over him before he could figure out what she was doing. She rolled over him and pulled him onto her back in a fireman’s carry.
“We don’t have time for you to mope on the floor all day,” she said, as she carried him to the elevator.
“You can put me down.”
“Yes, I could.”
She walked him to his room on the third floor and dumped him on the bed. “Shower and get ready to go in the vat. I’ll have it set up and waiting for you.” She abruptly left the room.
As he showered, he reflected that he now had the type of lifestyle that made people escape into games. Get up, work, work out, go to sleep. Most people only did three out of four, but still, his lack of freedom made him look forward to the game that much more. Since he was just going to get naked again when he stepped into the vat, he thought about just walking naked to the fourth floor. No human besides him had any access that high up, so there was no one to notice him.
Still, he felt self-conscious whenever he was naked, so he decided to go with more athletic clothing since as soon as he woke up, he’d be working out again. The thought made him nauseous. He remembered a movie where a high school kid has to fight the big bully at three o’clock, and he spends every class hour looking at the clock, dreading the moment that it would turn three. Mark knew exactly how that kid felt.
Begrudgingly, he dressed himself and walked down the empty corridors. It reminded him of the ambush corridor when his team was on the pirate space ship. He took the elevator up to the fourth floor, walked to his vat, stripped off his clothes, and hopped in. As the breathing visor went over his face, he could feel himself drifting off into the game.