Nox

It began as any other 'down' day.

There were no field tests scheduled, no weapon fittings to endure, no re-programing sessions in the white room. My body was sitting quietly in a chair at a small playing table. Jarren was sitting oposite, brow puckered in thought. He had set up his frazenboard between us, and he was using my hands to play a game of Two States against himself.

We were the only people in the containment room. Out in the guard station at the end of the corridor, I could hear Havier and Rolland talking about the next bagarrow game. Havier was a mean old cuss who knew the ropes, but Rolland was new. Inexperienced.

I wouldn't have this chance again. The testing and arming phases were nearly complete, and the week before I had overheard Dr. Marodian talking about doing a demonstration for High Command. I was running out of time.

I didn't watch the board. I watched Jarren, smiling inwardly as he began frowning, his eyes narrowing as he tried to make my fingers pick up a Sword and Rose. Each time, my hand moved toward a Shield and Stone instead. The growing confusion on his face was worth every fiery stab in my skull as I fought the obedience protocol.

"Odd," he muttered, glancing down at the contact glove that allowed him to control my muscles and movements. He unbuckled the leather gauntlet and peeled the palm piece off, then withdrew his fingers from the nest of control toggles that told my hand what his hand was doing.

I waited as he reached for one of the delicate rubber tubes that sprouted from the upper surface of the gauntlet like long, pale worms, each one joined together in a braided bundle that ran from the glove to the coupling apparatus strapped to my head.

I concentrated, focusing not on him, but on my own body, diverting every ounce of my energy into anticipating what was about to happen.

His fingers pinched the tube slightly.

After a year of observing everything Jarren did, I knew exactly which tube it was, and what response it would trigger.

I felt the familiar slide of that dark urge in my brain... but instead of lifting my little finger, my entire arm moved, and my hand reached up to grab the cable where it was latched into the interface headgear.

Jarren gasped like he had just set something on fire, and quickly released the tube, but it was too late. The impulses never died immediately, and my fingers completed the task I had decided was 'move right pinky.'

It took an insane amount of effort, holding that single thought in my head without varying it at all. I had no idea what it would do, either, ripping that cable out of me without cycling down my processes first. It might fry every last engine I had. But it was the only way out.

The cable disconnected with a mechanical 'pop'... and a sunburst went off in my brain. Sudden, blinding, white. It exploded through me, every nerve firing at once. That was it. I was dead. I had to be. 

But then my hydraulic lungs dragged air into my chest, and my heart kicked into rhythm. I staggered to my feet, clutching at my head, a metallic shriek tearing from my throat as my senses all came alive at once.

There was a clatter of wood as Jarren fell backwards in his chair. Long limbs flailing, he scrambled away, horror contorting his face as he realized the full extent of what I had just done. But there was a desperate cunning there, too. He rolled swiftly off the edge of the tilt-table platform and dropped to the floor. Then he made a mad dash for the control panel.

I knew what was about to happen. All those interminable safety drills had been good for something, at least. I glanced around, forcing myself past the dizzy rush of feeling everything. The main power coupling for the tilt table lay like a thick rubber snake at my feet. It took all of half a second to wrap my hand around it and tear it free.

Jarren reached the table, colliding with it in his hurry to get at that switch. But he never turned around to see what I was doing. He crashed into the table, bent over the top of the gear boxes and resistor jars, and slapped that emergency kill switch down, his mind on only that one thing.

I watched him turn. Watched his expression go from victory to slack-jawed disbelief.

The kill-switch not only locked down the warehouse and brought bars slamming up from the floor to turn the platform into a cage, it also sent a massive charge of electricity through the conductor cables that powered the tilt table. The power coupling in the tilt table was supposed to turn the cage into a gigantic fry basket, with me inside it. After they had cooked me, they could respell all the coding and I'd be good as new.

I was inside that cage, but the power coupling wasn't connected to the tilt table. It was pressed directly to the side of my skull. No resistors, no meter, nothing between me and an open current of raw electricity.

I thought it would melt something. Turn me into a pile of useless slag. Sure, they'd find a replacement, but they'd have to scramble to make all their military deadlines, and it would take years before they would get close to replicating what they had achieved with me. I was smiling like a fiend when Jarren flipped that switch, and the world lit up.

I didn't melt.

Instead, it was little more than a swift kick to the head. 

For a moment I was sent reeling. Then power unlike anything I had ever imagined was arcing and leaping over my skin. It was a storm-surge, pulsing and ricocheting through me, gathering momentum before shooting in all directions, tangling and connecting over the bars of the cage.

Jarren's mouth was moving. He was swearing as he lurched around to the other side of the control table, his hands flying, flipping switches, spinning dials.

Havier and Rolland arrived then, slamming through the door at the far end of the warehouse, guns drawn.

The current of electricity disappeared as Jarren cut off all supply from the generators, but it was too late. Every fiber of my body was expanding, growing, vibrating with the agony of being alive, changing shape with every disjointed thought in my head. For one endless moment I was formless, the strands of my metal frame flowing around me, flashing blue in the light bursting from inside my chest.

Then pain blossomed in my right shoulder.

Rolland was standing there with his pistol aimed at me, his eyes perfectly round.

I glanced down. There was a neat, glowing hole just below my right collarbone.

"I told you not to shoot it!" Jarren shouted as he scrambled over to the communications desk and snatched the cover off the relay device. He lifted the mouthpiece and yelled into it, his voice hoarse, "We've got a code nine! I repeat, we've gone code nine! Evacuate all non-essential personnel! This is not a drill!"

Dazed, I turned to look at them, knowing what was about to happen. I tried to alter it, to change that command in my head, but my weapons system was automatic. I couldn't stop it.

There was a familiar clicking sensation in my neck, then a smooth buzz of gears in my shoulders. My skin rippled, my metal frame rearranging itself to become the monster they had turned me into. A yellow-gold grid spread over every surface, defining measurements of everything I looked at, as well as my distance from it. A tiny set of crosshairs appeared over Havier and Rolland's foreheads, and the grid lit up the outline of the weapons they were carrying.

The centers of my palms began glowing a brilliant blue as the twin cannons inside my forearms whirred to life, recoil plates chunking into place. 

Time slowed. I stared through the bars, watching Havier and Rolland grab Jarren and make a stumbling run for the red blast door at the far end of the room, their movements disjointed.

Then everything ripped apart, splitting and blurring into red and blue refractions of shape and color. There were no bars. There was no air. There was only chaos radiating in all directions, sweeping everything away in an ever widening circle around me.

And then it was over, and I was standing in the middle of a bowl of molten metal and glowing glass. High above me, the ceiling had been carved into a similar hollow. Beyond the ceiling, there was only the angry red of superheated rock. Not sky.

I wasn't in a warehouse. I was underground. 

My survival protocol catalogued that piece of information even while I stood there, stunned.

That glowing grid hovered in front of me for a moment longer, outlining mounds of fallen roofing, ruined support beams, heaps of wires and gears and machinery. There wasn't a wall at the other end of the room anymore. No hallway beyond it, only a badly mangled hulk of lead-lined steel standing in the middle of the floor – the safe room Jarren, Havier and Rolland were hiding in.

After a few seconds a bright red line traveled along that glowing grid. Then it disappeared, and the violent blue light diminished to a dull glow. All immediate threats had been eliminated.

I didn't think beyond that fact. It was only a matter of time before someone came looking for me. Havier and Rolland had been the only ones stationed inside the containment building, but from what I had seen when Jarren took me out to the testing fields, this was a military compound. There had to be hundreds more up there. And I wasn't going to wait around to find out what other surprises lay beneath my skin. 

I scrambled out of that scorched-earth pit, then began making my way over collapsed concrete struts and masonry, heading for the warren of crumbling tunnels that had once been the system of hallways beyond the far wall of the containment room. Several of the rooms that had opened off of those hallways were gone, and furniture and equipment lay piled up against the farthest standing wall like flotsam washed up against a breaker.

There were three heartbeats inside the safety room as I drew closer, but none anywhere else. In hindsight, I should have done something to seal that red door. Shoved a heap of metal over it, or barred it off with one of the support columns. Instead, I charged past, focused on getting to the hallway that led out to the testing fields.  

I reached the place in the floor where the hallway had been – judging from the ceiling supports that lay scattered like matchsticks – but at the end of that hallway, where a doorway should have stood, there was only a massive pile of rock that had dropped from the ceiling. Trickles of earth and small stones were still dribbling down on everything, pattering on my head and shoulders as I came to a stumbling halt. It was gone. I glanced about, madly trying to find some other exit.  

There. The double accordion doors to the vehicle hangar hung in their rails, haphazard and crumpled, the doorframe still miraculously intact around them.

I whipped in that direction and set off, covering the forty or so yards far faster than I ever had when Jarren was in my head. I could see flames through the gaps in the door. Or through the door itself. I couldn't decide what I was looking at when I took hold of the edges of a panel and shoved it out of my way. Then I stepped into the great, vaulted room beyond.   

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