Hardwired 2.1

We'd arrived in the middle of his sleep cycle, when he would be knocked out from the hypnotics and soporifics pumped into his glass cell. Without the dampeners active, even deeply unconscious he would still provoke enough chaos to let us get into Behavioral, get Mox, and hopefully get out before anyone could bring it under control. I was massively enthused about the idea of having the dreams of a lunatic impinging on my mind, as you might expect.

It was, simply put, a bad plan, likely to fall apart before we'd made it halfway back to the front door. As it happened, things started going wrong the instant we walked into the room, so I suppose a better plan wouldn't have been much help.

The tube immediately opposite the entrance was empty, and while that in itself wasn't a problem, the two men in technician's coveralls working at an open panel on the lower dampener definitely were. Our casual walk didn't falter, we turned to head toward the main console as though we'd done it a hundred times, but still the nearer of the two techs turned.

Ignore us, ignore us, I urged him silently, giving as bland a smile and nod as I could manage and pointing vaguely toward my badge in the hopes that he would brush us off as someone else's problem. That hope faded when he put down a tool I couldn't have named for serious money and stood, wiping his hands with a rag. "Help you with something?" he asked.

"Just a second," Arkia said and I held up my index finger to reinforce the message, bland smile feeling more unnatural by the second. Turning our backs on him was further encouragement to leave us alone and gave cover for Arkia to raise her hand, ostensibly covering a cough, and draw the third and final of the doc's gifts out from her shirt. When I'd seen it earlier, prior to our reactivation, it had just been a silver chain necklace, but now there was a deep green crystal in the shape of a teardrop hanging from it. She whispered a word as it passed by her lips and a soft glow in the center of the crystal confirmed its awakening.

"Seriously, what're you doing here?" The voice before us drew me to a stop. I turned to see that the maintenance tech had followed us and I tried a friendly smile even as Arkia continued on to the raised dais with its ring of control panels.

"Just here to check a few settings for Doctor Kepperod," I answered, blessing Malk's data kleptomania. "We'll be out of your hair in no time." The tech gave me an odd look and I suddenly found that I was very aware of the weight and solidity of the tools on his belt.

"Doctor Kepperod called out sick today," he said, not returning my smile.

"I know," I said, extemporizing furiously. "That's why she wasn't able to come herself, but she wanted to do some remote work, so she sent us," and I gestured to Arkia, looked over to encourage her to join my story and the bottom dropped out of my stomach. Her hand over the panel told me that she had already started the process, that right now the digital acid in the necklace's crystal of data was lapping hungrily around every safeguard that held Brockwelter in his prison.

And my perfect view of the floating screens behind Arkia's shoulder, the ones the tech had distracted her from noticing, showed that our distraction was most definitely not in a chemical coma. He wasn't even just wide awake. He and the dark-haired woman in the cell next to him were giving each other quite the show.

Both were stripped naked, uniforms tossed aside, and she was sprawled with legs wide against the far side of her cell so Brockwelter could watch her hands working away at her clit and breast. There was no sound but her lips were urging him on, wet from her darting tongue, and her every wink, every silent moan and pinch of her nipple perfectly conveyed mockery at his helplessness. Her audience was standing, one meaty hand pressed against the glass, the other working away at waist height but hidden from the camera by the simian mass of his back and shoulders. Nearby inmates pounded on the walls of their cells or gave silent encouragement, but even at a distance the pair were clearly focused on each other to the exclusion of all else.

Our plan had gone from bad to completely, utterly fucked. Unconscious Brockwelter being released was a radiation leak in a fission reactor: dangerous, somewhere between urgent and panic. It was a measured emergency, especially with the tech right there. Conscious, horny Brockwelter? We'd set the reactor into a meltdown and it was all already too late.

The tech forgot me the instant the first dampener gave its death scream of overloading circuitry. "Oh, f-" he managed before the bow wave of the new reality slammed into us with typhoon force. A blast of white light detonated behind my eyes and I was on the floor, slumped to my knees without any memory of transition. The ambient room lighting was gone and it was the crackling light of overloading electronics, every dampener bleeding blue sparks, that showed me the tech unconscious on the floor in front of me. He doesn't matter. He isn't prey.

I shook my head and raised a hand to my eyes, and the hand that I raised wasn't mine. My arm didn't have those ropes of muscle and sinew wrapping them, didn't have this coarse black hair over implant scars on its forearm. My arm had... something that was missing now. Words? Another shake of my head.

Couldn't have been that important if it was just words.

What's important is that I'm out of that fucking jar. I stand up, spreading my arms wide, rejoicing in freedom and space. Hydraulic hisses accompany polyglass cylinders around me dropping into their floor recesses. They set loose rivals and victims.

The one that comes at me is strong, like me, even looks like he got his face altered to look like me. So, some kinda fanboy? Guess I must be famous. He's clumsy, though, like he hasn't gotten used to the vat-grown muscle yet, and I don't plan to give him a chance. I'm not feeling quite right myself, like some of my own muscle grafts aren't functioning properly. Doesn't matter. Even if I can't break a cement block with my fists right now I'm still unstoppable.

Off to one side, my favorite frustration has decided to join in: Courinna, the vicious little brunette bitch from the next cage who lives to tease me. I can read lips a little, I know what she's saying. She's been begging for it for months. Begging for me to fuck her, use her, hurt her. She's doing it now, demanding a winner.

"Come on, you pussies," She laughs, lifting her shirt and shaking her tits at me. "Can't either of you finish this and come fucking give me what I need? Balls falls off in the cell?" I can hear the same taunting voice from other places nearby, other sounds of flesh smacking flesh, some roars and moans. None of it is important.

He overextends with a wild roundhouse, too much commitment to the swing without any finesse. I slip under it, shift off to the side, plant a fist in his liver that crumples him to the floor like he's deflating. The sight of my own features in pained defeat nags at something in the back of my head but I've already lost interest. He's done. I've got that little bitch Courinna to deal with.

Even her cheers at my victory are mocking and my face is twisted in lust and rage when I lunge for her. The building rumble in the floor matches my growl as I pin her to the wall but I'm too hungry to care about details. Her slim hands are lost from the wrist up in my single hand, the tips of her toes brushing lightly on the floor. My curled fingers tear through her prisoner's uniform like paper, my own pants are on the floor in an instant.

I'm pressed against her, my size and bulk a declaration of control and a threat equally, her sharp chin cupped in my hand to force her lips to mine. With my tongue in her mouth I reach down and wrap a hand around her calf, fingers easily meeting around it, and lift her foot onto my shoulder. She squirms but the wall at her back isn't giving her any more choice than I am and she hisses into my mouth when I give her exactly what she's been begging for.

The bitch needs to learn just what she's gotten herself into and I'm already plenty fucking warmed up. Feels like she's pretty heated up from watching the fight, too. No hesitation, I'm eager to find and break her first limits, and she's calling me a miserable son of a bitch as I bottom out inside her. I release her calf, leaving her ankle trapped on my shoulder and slap a hand sharply downward across one of those perfect tits, nipple springing back hard in challenge.

Pull my head back just enough to spit in her face and give her another good smack, this one across her ass, the implanted muscle of my hips engaged to slam into her relentlessly. She keeps trying to force a slower rhythm, trying to find a space to adjust to the fullness and the intensity but she's nowhere near capable of forcing anything. She's mine to use and she will know it in every impact that rocks her body until she is limp and lost.

It's with my hand tightly gripping her ass and my teeth pulling at her lip that I come to the song of her screams, forcing her through the orgasm she tries to deny, howls of lust all around us a counterpoint to the basso profundo rumble that is coming from underneath us. That rumble rises in pitch through an entire register until it's at a subsonic squeal and there's another burst behind my eyes, this one black. There's confusion and frustration in my roar and I'm falling again, the bitch falling with me and...

My eyes reopened on impact with the floor, the whine of the emergency suppression field in the floor of the room cutting through the fog of Brockwelter's imposed self. I was sprawled like a marionette with cut strings, Arkia on top of me, her features her own again under hair returned to its former dirty blonde. Some guy who looked like an accountant was lying a few feet away from us. His arms were curled tightly to his ribs; my former rival, the other Brockwelter, just as much a puppet of the brute's madness. A cold rush of adrenaline flooded my veins. I bolted upright and drew Arkia's head to my lap, stroking her cheek with fingers that still felt the wrong size.

"One more time?" she murmured and a wicked smile as her eyes reopened lowered my heart rate. "I'm fine, B.G. Come on, let's get to Mox, we can freak out when we're outside." I helped her to her feet, still shaky and uncertain on my own, and grabbed a nearby pair of pants as she did the same.

On the other end of the room the real Brockwelter was barely visible in the center of a half-dome of clashing energies some thirty feet across. A few of the other inmates were inside the dome's limits, and every one of them was still wearing either the bestial features of the man controlling them or the face of the woman from the next cell, Courinna. I wished them well in finding themselves again when they were freed from the crushing force of Brockwelter's projected self. I felt stained myself, tainted by the contact, a footprint left where he had stood on my soul. Worst of all, it was grotesquely familiar.

I'd been inside his head and no longer had any doubt whatsoever. He had been trying to break free, just like me. He'd been borderline, like me, maybe a little worse, definitely more determined. But he'd tried it all alone, and his early successes just meant that he failed partway through, left there unfinished like Frankenstein's creation and just as much a monster.

More techs were rushing into the room, orderlies joining them to corral the dazed and bruised inmates. Portable suppressors were being set up at the edges of the crackling dome, pushing it slowly inward to the madman at its heart, and the last thing anyone was going to notice was a pair of interns supporting each other and staggering away through the door to Behavioral Therapy. We'd made it to the lowest level of hell, to the very heart of the dragon's lair.

Historically, that is not the hard part.

-Conclusion in Hardwired 2.2

SLH