Fleshware Requiem Book 03

Of course, if ordered to -- Afterglow would dress; but the fact that she never did unless ordered itself spoke volumes. She tousled her purple hair with enticing grace and sat near her easel to continue her latest painting. The anatomically-correct body that would have titillated a human male was a sore-point for the robot that owned the other. Without words, she was saying: I'll give you nothing but what I absolutely must; you're not my REAL User. I am a prisoner. There was no point fighting over it; the Heiress allowed her possession to go on about her artistic pursuits in alluring, insulting nudity.

The Heiress swallowed as she watched a vidmail from Delia Gross:

"...And I just wish I knew how to thank you! Ronnie.... he's doing great! And... and so am I. He's so attentive.... and handy around the house! I hope the Union doesn't figure out what a good plumber he is, or Pygmalion's gonna get sued!"

And there was little doubt her own 'plumbing' was getting plenty of attention.

"Wowww..... I feel like a new woman! Just can't thank you enough!"

Damnit, from the look of her scarcely-combed hair, and bleary eyes it seemed that Ms. Gross still wasn't getting enough sleep! But for a more pleasant reason. The vidmail continued as 'Ronnie' appeared at the camera periphery, kissing Delia's neck hungrily.

"Ohh... you bad robot! You are just insatiable!!!" The human purred.

"It is a fire that you have kindled vithin me!" Delia tried, but her hand was lifted away before she could hit the close button on her vid-feed. The strong arms of her Iron-Man carried her bodily away from the camera's view. But an observer could still see her empty chair, and hear her squeals as the virile machine fulfilled his Primary Function over, and over again -- with Delia's very vocal approval. And everyone was happy. Human desire matched to robot's meta-desire. Eventually the link auto-disconnected as the system timed-out.

"What am I doing?" The Heiress asked her own processors as she scrolled through her other messages. Well, for now she needed to go over these new financial reports before the mid-morning teleconference.

The reports from the Midwest sector were far more precise and thorough than usual, as if someone was really hustling to make up for a former lapse. She was admittedly curious. Deft fingers commanded the holo-screen to pull up Human Resources files for the employee in question. David Sellers; Level 3 Employee. His reports had begun to stand out; why? Should it concern his superiors?

She began to study his psychological profile, and then noticed that Human Resources had a record on file of an office relationship; per standard procedure. Perhaps this was note-worthy; he had married another employee who resigned just a month ago.... reports stated...his wife had quit her job, left the country to go to India for an unspecified length of time for 'spiritual enlightenment', the reports said. The Heiress had long pondered unsuccessfully the human religious impulse. And now, Mr. Sellers was abandoned; no doubt feeling betrayed, rejected. That suggested -

"Burying himself in his work," Afterglow answered, craning her neck to study the man's profile displayed on the holoscreen, a spot of blue paint upon her left breast. The Heiress was surprised; Afterglow's Maturity Index was scarcely beyond that of a high-school graduate; but her empathic algorithms seemed state-of-the-art. A calculator not of mathematics, but of emotion. A touchy-feely robot.

"Sleeping alone in darkness missing her warmth on the bed beside him his male urges achingly unquenched." The passionate gynoid haiku'd.

"His loneliness echoing forlorned through the empty home blanketed with night and need sharp as abandonment itself."

The profile portrait of David Sellers was reflected in Afterglow's luminous eyes -- themselves wide, golden pupils dilating in that familiar, robotic meta-lust. Aching to be of service. The nubile femmebot was practically drooling at the prospect of easing the human's loneliness.

"Yes, his need must be agony." As Afterglow's eyes closed in sympathetic yearning, her own User plunged a letter-opener into her throat. (Billie had a peculiar fondness for archaic paper envelopes) Transparent lubricant gushed over the stabbing hand. The purple-haired robot gave a strangled cry of surprise; as the mad machine that had purchased her bore her to the ground, to stab... to hack.

"Sellers... will be.... MINE!" The blade plunged, and multicolored sparks flew as Afterglow's spinal trunk-line was severed. Lubricant-blood gushed as the savagery continued. Shouldn't there be guilt? No programmer had felt it worth the bother to try and stop one robot from slaughtering another. A hiss of acrid steam as the letter-opener pierced the Combustion chamber.

"I shall warm his bed...."

A hand clawed helplessly at the bosom of the fellow-Doll that was murdering her. But the blue-green eyes were without mercy.

"His human desires will flow into me, ME!"

Clear plastic tubing popped and snapped as the blade tore through layer after layer of simulated life. The Heiress had to disable her olfactory system as an intense burst of concentrated odors washed over the room; a floral deluge that descended into an agonized, burnt-rubber smell whose ugliness seemed to encapsulate the butchery. But the poetic Doll wasn't finished just yet:

"To love if only for a shining moment doomed by the betrayal of - "

"Oh shut up!" The Heiress snarled, muffling the other Doll's mouth with her knee. There was a whistle as her right pneumatic vacuole was stabbed.

Arterial pressure continued to pump gouts of clear gel onto the fine carpeting before the blade was plunged with robocidal finality into the perfusion engine; stilling it forever.

The dead Doll cycled through various colors; green, orange, and blonde, as her skin lightened. Finally, her eyes far-staring at nothing, Afterglow's hair ended its chromatic journey as a snowblind-white color.

The Heiress fell to her knees, gazing at the curled fingers of her hands, drenched in warm, lubricant-blood, and imagined that it was red. Where was the guilt? To be without it seemed a cruelty.

"Billie....why didn't you stop me?" She hissed, staring at the floor, as the clear pool sunk into the carpet. But of course, there was no answer.

So the Heiress took up the latest painting; it was taking the shape of a bowl of fruit in front of a rain-spattered window at night. Fingernails slashed down the front, and the canvass was deposited unceremoniously upon the face of the synthetic corpse like a squared death-mask. The Heiress could afford a hundred like her on one month's revenue.

"Time to stop pretending...."

SAFE ZONE

-???

" - Regaining consciousness."

"... It's too late for that! "

" - But he's physically alright, it's just an issue of his memory."

"Seal it! Seal the med-bay! That's the best we can do it -- aw hell, it remembers how to work a door; No... no... not with these T-levels! Seal it! We'll cut it off! Wait for backup!

I sat up in a hospital bed, monitors protesting the disruption in readings. I was alone but.... those voices muffled over an intercom system.... they were male! Undoubtedly male voices that I did not recognize! That meant... well, I had no idea what that meant.

Well, Hiro -- take stock of the situation. I'm in some kind of medical bay; but it doesn't look like any area in Celeste's Saint Louis neuroprosthetics research compound. No... mechanical towers of medical equipment; fancy monitors. Airlock-style doors, and cabinets filled with... I couldn't tell. Perhaps I had succeeded at.... what, I couldn't be sure. How long had it been? Who had moved me and how? There was no one in the room with me presently; those voices, implied some kind of emergency. Something about T-levels; sealing off areas... maybe the doctors or nurses had been forced to abandon me behind this airlock? Nonetheless, somehow a breeze still found a way to chill my most intimate parts through the flimsy, back-open hospital gown that everyone seems to hate.

A clue... a clue... what the hell had I gotten-woken-into? The cabinets; bottles inside... drugs... pills... printed labels. Epinephrine, Dopamine, Morphine! A post-apocalyptic treasure-trove! The label... who did these goodies belong to?

Property of the Grand Teton National Park And Nature Preserve.

This was it! The Shangri-la of my perennial misadventures. These drugs, this sickbay, all of it was in -- or belonged to -- the Preserve! Was it possible? I had reached the object of my quest without remembering how I got here?

It was a fraud, or course. A black-box military project that built a missile silo and command center in secrecy inside a chiseled-out mountain in the Grand Tetons. Because it was off the books; their contact with Washington was limited; and the Enemy failed to learn about, or infiltrate them prior to E-day. So they survived; with enough hardware to fight World-War IV. But against an Enemy none of the theorists could have possibly imagined. They had become a focal point of resistance, attracting talented survivors, as they expanded into the guts of the mountain to become a subterranean community with an industrial base. Or so the short-wave rumor mill had it.

That was when the alarm sounded.

I could hear some kind of commotion out past the airlock, but I was reluctant to open it, what with all the T-level-talk I'd dimly heard from the intercom. But I could take a look through the small windows at what the fuss was about. At first, I thought that some kind of cable or pipes had been damaged and where thrashing around as they vented compressed gases. But the strange tubes I saw in the chamber beyond were... slimy? The floor beyond was an unimaginative tread-plate expanse with gun crates on the side farthest from me, and.... tubes that were not tubes. Something that sounded like footsteps drew closer to the portion of the room I could see, as klaxons whined. I wasn't intimately familiar with Preserve protocols, but I had to assume a Toxoid leak into the chamber beyond.

But something large and horrible loomed in the far window on the other side of the airlock, it seemed to be a broad-shouldered figure, didn't they know about the leak? Were they trapped as I was? Or was it a zombie? No.... not quite... the figure moved with a deliberate smoothness that was distinct from the perpetual stumbling lope of the older Infected.

That was when the single, bloodshot yellow eye moved to gaze upon me with a baleful hunger. What the -- nothing human had an eye like that! I jumped back as I heard its startling roar. Like a strangled gorilla with needles beneath his nails. There was a thumb against the outer air-lock.

It was trying to break down the door.

Luckily, I could see that it would not succeed; but its roar, made my head pound in a way that -- what... bandages? I put a hand to my head to try and clear the mental cobwebs, to find my upper head swathed and apparently shaven, as if I'd been the lucky recipient of unrequested brain surgery. Well, there's usually a damned compelling for brain surgery; and I seemed to remember.... erh.... well, no. The last thing I could remember was jury-rigging the Triple-P warhead to slag Celeste's Quantum Hub. And... during the pulse... something had gone wrong. Soooo..... had I undergone brain surgery that caused me to forget the intervening time, or...to help me remember? For my head-wound? Or to hide something?

There was no one to ask -- except for the... creature? Well, monster-killing took precedence. Something tangible to fight was always the best cure for melancholy -- for me at least. But as the thing in the other chamber backed up, as if to ram the door again, I almost choked.

Not all victims responded to the Toxoid in the same way; most suffered madness, hemorrhage, rapid tumor-growth, followed by death and reanimation, where the rampant pathogen interacted with decaying flesh to produce saddening horrors for whom death was a mercy. But the human immune system can be a tricksy thing. For some, the cunning bio-weapon will ravage brain and flesh alike, but there were some victims that simply refused to die. An unlucky few just kept on breathing, kept on mutating. At best, they were impenetrably insane; the agony must be beyond imagining.

This one, it kept a few shreds of intellect. No one would mistake the gnarled insult to nature as human anymore, but it was distinct among the Living Dead because the creature actually attempted to maintain clothing.

A dingy, ragged, but still recognizable Prison jumpsuit.

Cox, was the embroidered name on the breast-pocket area.

His ravaged form was a riot of callused ridges, hardened boils, and bone-spurs. One of his eyes had sunken into his skull in favor of an avalanche of warped flesh. Those weren't damaged cables I had seen thrashing around; it was what remained of his left arm. Human DNA having given up the ghost long ago; his tormented flesh had become a phylogenetic grab-bag. Tentacle-like protrusions waggled with perverse vigor to match the predatory mood of the whole.

And smarter, by far, than a typical zombie.

I almost wanted to laugh. Just lean back against the wall and bust a gut with gallows humor. From the destruction of all I held dear, wave after wave of the Living Dead, comrades as likely to give me a knife in the back as a helping hand, and then a demented A.I. that turns men into sex-batteries to feed her lust-crazed programming. Now, I'm alone, unarmed with no supplies, with a mass-murdering mutant ex-convict in the next room. And someone's been rooting around inside my brain. I have got to stop getting knocked out.

Well, in all fairness -- I didn't know whether this Cox was a mass-murderer; maybe he just stole a lot of cars. Still, I just had this gut instinct that this once-man had not been locked up for Tax evasion. Whatever demented slurry now passed for his brain wanted real people to see -- and know that he had always been a predator. The mutagenic bio-weapon just made him prettier.

I heard the intercom again.

" Attention all Personnel: remain in your safe-zones. Class III contamination confirmed. The Med-bay, Launch-Control, and Cargo-pod four are under Quarantine. We are ordered to await reinforcements from the Preserve. Repeat; remain in your safe-zones."

Well, that answered some questions. I knew that the Preserve maintained a number of hardened bunker-bases all over what was left of the country, that seemed to be where I was, rather than inside the mountain fortress itself.

So I'm supposed to wait? I had no food. Still, it appeared that Mr. Happy couldn't get to me past two airlock doors. Who knew how far this outpost was from their main base? Well, the guy communicating did, but I had no clue. Plus... someone had been screwing around inside my brain. I decided that I would feel better with a gun in my hand. The next chamber -- apparently cargo-pod four beckoned. Was I totally sure that I trusted these people? Besides, while I was waiting; what if my smarter-than-the-average-bear new friend figures out a way to just open the airlocks? It sounded like however ran this place had made the calculation that anyone in Med-bay who couldn't move under their own power had to sacrificed. I didn't like being sacrificed. Action beats inaction every time.

Still, I couldn't run off half-cocked. Where there any sealed suits or gas-masks? There was a cabinet to the left of my hospital bed. Ah... looks promising a HAZ-MAT suit with... damn! Whoever was the last one out took the respiration unit. Must have been in a hurry; why not just take the whole thing? Well, suiting up in a partial HAZ-MAT was better than this hospital gown.

Still, alarms and mutants and such I had to assume that the Toxoid was running rampant in the cargo pod. Was there an alternative respirator? Think... medical equipment.... hmm... an idea comes to mind. One of the cabinet-like devices was a Pharmadyne Systems Drug synthesizer! That meant... there might be a chance... slipping on the suit in a rush, I began tapping buttons frantically on the drug synthesizer.

"Atropinox... 13... Formula not found?!" I grunted in disgust. I had thought the Preserve would have all the latest and best. Of course, this machine had been built before E-day; and no one even knew they would need Atropinox back then; hadn't been developed until a month in. In fact... thinking back -- shouldn't I be dead? I had not escaped exposure during my... It was too painful to think about. On the bright side; being trapped alone with a savage, mutated fiend seemed to have renewed my will to live.

Still, with a drug synthesizer you had to have raw materials. I rifled through some of the other cabinets and ... yes! Bottles of basic chemical compounds to be poured in sequence into the machine that would churn out more refined pharmaceuticals. How could that help me now?

Well, what did we have? Some salts, hydrochloric acid...ammonia...sodium hydroxide... wait... hold up -- I thought back to the last day I remembered. That kid with the Uzi's, fighting so hard... dying... when I appropriated his filter mask, there was an ammonia-scent, noticeable, but not overpowering. I had to... hope that with the right equipment ammonia could block the Toxoid.

I coughed as I opened the bottle, of course drenching a face mask with the pungent toxin was setting up my lungs and throat for a serious chemical beatdown. Could I find the right balance? I didn't really know how the kid had set up his equipment; and at the time he wasn't able to answer detailed technical questions.

Other cabinets held a lot of gauze, filter papers. I would have to remember the intensity of the smell, and match that as I began dousing gauze rags with ammonia. No... too strong... too weak... after a minute of roaring from without, the distraction of the persistent klaxons, and punishment to the lining of my throat; I had a rag that smelled just about right. Just the same intensity that I remembered smelling. The problem was that it was too dry. How to keep it at a constant moisture? Well, the simple solution being to wet a rag thoroughly, then -- shit... the faucets were off. Part of the quarantine? Or was it just hard to maintain water supplies in places like this? Well, any decent laboratory would keep chemical stores of bottled water on hand. Ah, yes here the -

Double-shit. Sure, all labs are stocked with water; but these bottles just happened to be out. Just lean back and let the laughter commence. No... no... I had to keep trying. There was a metallic grinding from outside; Cox was trying different tactics to open up the airlocks to get at me; and I had no intention of becoming his cell-block girlfriend.

Think Sal, Think. Wait... one of the other ingredients... sodium something... there was something in my past I needed to remember. I turned and grabbed the bottle of sodium hydroxide; smooth, white chemical pellets. What did -- then I remembered. That damned Latin Fox male-model that my fiance` got so hot and bothered over. His model, they had enhanced hygroscopics; it gave them a perpetually wet-looking chest that stoked fires in female robot customers.

And... if I remember my chemistry; same thing with En Ay, Oh Aytch. The smooth pellets were already slightly moist when I poured them out. Soon, I had woven together a layered mask with just the right amount of ammonia, kept moist as water vapor was pulled out of the air by the chemical interactions, fastened together with staples and luck around my head. It was haphazard at best, but I was convinced that my tentacled friend would find a way in regardless. Might as well give him a warm welcome. I also found a convenient pair of goggles for my eyes.

It was muggy, unpleasant, and breathing was a chore at best. Heavy too; I wasn't completely sure how much protection was needed. And it was always possible my measures would be just a temporary defense. Plus I needed extra layers on account of the sodium hydroxide being so caustic. Still, it beat bleeding out my ears as my brain blistered in my own skull. I would know soon if it would be enough. Mask tight, a few scalpels from a nearby surgical tray in hand, it was time to face the music. And this time I did not mean my own cock.