TO: BLACK WOLF COMPANY “Dire”
SUBJECT: classified results
READ STATUS: Read [Set to Auto-Delete in 7 days]
Audio Log Curve Decrypted
Hi, Layer 1 came back with results. Attached. Superior’s responses have been muted due to security measures, resulting in the Curve being… one sided sounding, as per [your] request.
•
Unknown Carbon Based Material found on the metallic plating of specimen 0016J [redacted], dating over 11000000 years old. In [redacted], the automaton was actually first involved in several successful eliminations of key leadership positions within the Iris Corporation, resulting in an effective interference in their growth. However, in the location the unit was discovered, it failed to deliver a contract’s completion when an unexpected device was utilized, briefly disappearing and reappearing where the contact point was discovered. [See Mission Failure 007].
It’s missing several components, the Nanomachine Housing, Weapon units, and general defensive shielding the other ones would possess, but that’s expected of a strange time-traveling robot, am I right? The Nanites power the thing, that’s why it didn’t vaporize everyone around its contact point, of course. The strange metal composite and impossibly ancient isotopes attached to it can only link the Strange Automata, 0016J specimen, and MISA 0007 though the details are — yes, yes, we’ll bring results. I am speaking [redacted], dammit. Pay attention! Whatever found the failed MISA unit must have altered Black Wolf Company Property during its brief stay over there and irreversibly messed with its age. It is presumed that the Automata had fulfilled its mission, seeing that the Chairwoman of Iris Corporation has been currently MIA ever since.
I understand she was your… No sign of her plane, though. Yes, yes, I will go ahead and change the Mission Status to Successful. So long, Claire Iris.
•
“You know the standard protocols, right?” One of the guards walked down the hall with his superintendent, was the first to accidentally bring the bad news by speaking on his unfortunate encounter today. “Hands where I can see ‘em, now I gotta frisk you, lady it’s my job I don’t feel comfortable doing this either, yada yada.”
“Yeah, yeah, Barton, who’d ya zap this time?” The boss spoke casually, lighting a cigarette as they got to the shack several football fields away from main HQ.
“Head honcho Alpha lady, bad news. Asian, not my type, but killer looks. Literally,” Barton complained, gesturing at an imaginary security x-ray belt. “Asked if she was carrying. The crazy lady actually said yes! We wanted to laugh. But instead of pepper spray, she brought out four knives that didn’t even fit in the bin, goddamn! Three guns around her waist and thigh, and even her heels had some sort of secret agent crap shoot tiny darts out of them! That was before she threatened to rip Joe’s throat open for looking at her a little too openly.”
“No kiddin’?” The superintendent questioned. His world almost shook from having an off putting feeling over Barton’s strange tale, though it blew away with the smoke he exhaled when his subordinate confirmed his story was true. “No kiddin’. Ever catch her badge’s ID?”
“Uhh, ah, not really, boss,” Barton furrowed his brow, apparently trying to remember. “Something with an M, uhh, Mina? Miranda?”
“No kiddin’,” the superintendent repeated himself. An M name… Where has he heard that before?
A hundred guys on patrol seemed like a lot, but based on what package they were guarding and the fact that she came all the way out here by herself told him that they should have sent way more guys. His memories of getting here were wiped, but since Iris was hellbent on showing up personally that package they had must be exceptionally important. Her space elevator, a massive teleportation station that beamed things up to some rich people’s hangout spot in space had actually landed down here. It loomed above them in the silky white fog, clogging up the moonlight sky and contributing to his overall unease. For all he knew, that CEO was flying up there at some point this morning and he and his boys will be out of her hair for good. After she pays them, of course. He tossed the cigarette, deciding they had better be more productive from here on out.
“Break’s over,” he commanded. Barton grunted, grabbing his gear.
“We have a ton of guys here, boss,” he chuckled. “Hey, boss. You know they even have the lasers set up in H1, those big ass beams that can cut through steel and stuff?”
“Yeah?”
That’s where they were headed, but for some reason a foreboding feeling crept inside the superintendent’s mind. The head honcho woman was Asian and there was only one company — if he could even call it that— from overseas that Iris dealt with. Why did that missing name information disturb him? All these thoughts made him grip his gun. Something was messing with him as they got close to H1 and this heat was especially bothersome. Heat?
“Say… You feeling it getting hotter?” He asked, trying to keep it nonchalant. Barton waved a hand dismissively, but he realized he was sweating.
“We’re in a desert, boss,” he laughed it off nervously. “Don’t know what to tell you.”
“It’s a quarter past 03!” The superintendent checked his watch. Before Barton could respond an alarm blared, followed by the harsh screaming of the metal wall ripping apart in front of them. “Shit!”
The two men immediately drew their weapons and prepared themselves for whoever was coming through, with the superintendent’s alert signal already sounding across the bases.
“What’d you say about the lasers again?”
Barton stayed quiet, but instead gestured that those security measures were inside the room as they leaned against the walls. Before relief could fall upon the superintendent, the sleeved arm of some security officer suddenly flung out of the hole like a tossed dog bone. Where was the rest of him? The men panicked. That ashen arm was soldered and cauterized nearly perfectly from the shoulder, presumably from traveling involuntarily through the deadly laser room. He could make out Lyle’s security serial code on the brassard. Barton yelped. More blackened, charred pieces of him flew out of the fiery smoke. The lasers were chewing something apart, though footsteps were still approaching.
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Multiple intruders? How are they getting through the lasers? The superintendent was bewildered, but also simultaneously cursing his luck. He should never have took this job. Barton screamed as a metallic hand suddenly gripped the hole, widening the gap effortlessly as the metal sheet plate howled as if in pain itself. Before his muscles could shoot at whatever was coming through, a heel clicked on the hallway floor followed by the face of an Asian woman emerging through the hole. Her terrifyingly emotionless face scanned both of them, making the superintendent suddenly remember who this woman was.
Misa, that was her name.
Surprisingly, she simply strode on through and ignored them. They, in turn, both nodded at each other in a silent agreement. Any crazy robot lady able to survive a laser minefield is free to roam the premises as far as they were concerned.
•
The woman was shaking, crawling beneath the airplane seats. Claire cursed. She just had this soft carpeting fiber installed a week ago! Something flew above her, staining her skin and making the ground even worse than it was before. Sticky, red? The offending thing splattered in front of her, nearly making her scream.
It was a severed arm, real flesh leaking real blood. Larry! The only security detail member she knew who still had actual human arms. His dying wails pounded in her ears as she pushed past the fleshy thing. More robotic joints groaned ominously through the smoky atmosphere. She covered her mouth as the flames flickered within the exposed Hall air and screams contrasted the bullet fire. Claire only had to get that asset secured, or die trying. Nothing else mattered. It was already on the elevator, so she simply had to get to the reactor and launch it.
Another scream pierced her ears as she continued her way to the back of the airplane. She hated how this was the only way to fly up to the damn space elevator in the first place! That monster machine roared a metallic shriek before unleashing more bullets. Seat fluff and hot metal pelted her back as the cracking noises whizzed over her in erratic pinwheels of sparks. She knew it had to be messing with her. Why else would a killing machine take its time shredding all her guards to pieces? The crunching metal of the floor collapsing suddenly quickened towards her location. She swore again at her own thoughts. First, her beautiful carpet and then the state of the art futuristic graded metal flooring? She didn’t have the time to complain, so she rushed through the elevator’s auxiliary room.
Claire’s fingers were shaking, stained with someone else’s blood, but she made it. The cold metal bolt hissed as the vault doors fussed about before finally shutting. She was separated from that pyscho, but only temporarily so. A dent was already beginning to form on the plating, though she couldn’t hear that thing from the other side. Think, Claire, think! She chastised herself, though all the energy patches on her were used up. The launch code pads were already through the other side and the passcode was in her head, so how will she be able to get to the pads without turning into that killer’s art decoration?
The security cabinet!
A moment’s hesitation would kill her. She had to use it, peering at the cable extension cord jack winded up in her cybernetic arm. The vault crunched as the beatings from the outside continued, forcing her to act. Claire bolted towards the security cabinet, pulled the cord and plugged it into its containment terminal. She began furiously punching hundreds of digits on her wrist to make it open. The footsteps were closer in the busted security feed and the screams were dying down over the static. With the launch code patched through, she had a chance to disable that demon robot woman and buy some time. The device inside the stupid security cabinet was definitely going to kill her, but she already programmed the launch codes to start should she die.
“Therefore,” she sighed, as the cabinet opened right as the vault’s door screeched and collapsed. Glowing red eyes pierced the smoke and dust cloud filling the room. “Wait. Why can’t I move?”
Claire’s heart dropped once she felt pain simulate inside her shoulder. A rod of metal from the vault’s door had pierced completely through her. She laughed as the figure approached her slowly.
“Claire Lykos,” the robot’s feminine tone surprised her. Claire cackled at the irony of it all. Someone prettier than her was her killer.
“Shut up, you stupid heap of metal,” she screamed at it bitterly. She was in range of the cabinet and that machine already calculated that she couldn’t escape. The security device was resting inside the cabinet. Temporal Displacement Device, the first and only device of its kind. It had no safety features, being from that alien ship. Coincidentally, it was also the reason why the robot was after her in the first place. At best, it will warp everything here inside out. At worst, it will stop the launch from happening temporarily and allow him to locate it. Speaking of him, Claire angrily glared at the robot.
“Father sent you, didn’t he?”
“The client has ordered your elimination, Claire Lykos,” the robot did not confirm or deny it. Typical of him.
“Too cowardly to admit he sold me out,” Claire laughed bitterly. The smoke lifted and the slim, yet deadly frame of the android appeared. Whoever created it had an eye for beauty, but that only made her cough in disgust as she clutched her arm. “MISA, aren’t you? An imperfect failure of a killing machine, of course. He wouldn’t even give me the honor of fighting a better robot. Ha!”
“The task is at hand. Black Wolf Company Contract processing…” MISA rose “her” hand, and immediately the metal platings acting as its skin revealed a swirling mass of glowing sparks swarming beneath it where its radius and ulna would be.
“Nanites?” Claire realized that her Father went too far this time. “Before you do the honor, you stupid machine, let me speak. I know he’s probably got his eyes on me through your stupid failure of a face.”
“Negative, commencing…” MISA’s voice trailed off. Yes! The robot’s directive was being overridden by whoever was watching her. A new voice began to play from the machine’s luscious lips, though it was a male’s. Claire’s blood chilled. That was not her Father! She had a whole speech to go off on that bastard and everything. “Claire, my dear.”
“Cruise,” Claire spat, as her fingers began to roll the gears in her pierced shoulder.
“Don’t be so rude, dear,” Cruise’s voice chuckled. “You know, I thought we were friends. Business rivals, for sure. But friends, and all of this? How could you!”
“T-This doesn’t seem friendly, does it, Cruise?” Claire tugged at the metal bar that pinned her. The man behind the MISA unit laughed arrogantly.
“Custom made for you,” Cruise taunted her predicament. The machine leaned against a table as if he was standing there himself, laughing at her. “Your Father has always spoiled you. It’s a shame that this hit has to be this way.”
“Father gave me this arm,” Claire angrily retorted. “He also was the reason I lost it in the first place!”
Before the MISA unit could respond, she unlatched the last gear and freed herself from the metal rod. Her eyes were warning her that her blood loss was severe, but she pulled the spherical Temporal Displacement Device from the security cabinet with one hand, lifting it up. The arm still pinned to the wall held it in place. Predictably, she heard laughing instead of any further thought on what she was planning. Typical Cruise, your arrogance makes you shortsighted!
“That faulty thing will not hurt my beloved MISA,” Cruise howled. The robot immediately rushed over and seized her by the throat. Claire screamed at the sudden pain, realizing her other hand was gone in a flash. The nanite swarm was eating her flesh, replacing the skin and bone with nothing but a burning agony. She realized, to her horror, that her entire body was dissolving in the nanite swarm’s goo. Through the hell she was facing and about to go to, she spat directly on the MISA bot’s face.
“Tell Father,” Claire managed to croak as she watched the cord jack on the severed arm attach to the device. The swarm had already taken her ability to say something witty, but the last thing Claire saw was her cybernetic hand pull the Temporal Displacement Device’s trigger before everything went white.