The Laboratory Omnibus

by Skyler Grant

  I'd seen first-hand in my tests what a dramatic reaction it caused in Hot Stuff. I wasn't sure what effect multiple rounds would have, but I suspected it might be fatal. I didn't want to risk my test subject to check.

  "You're sure this will work?" Anna asked for at least the dozenth time.

  "Again, not at all. We each want this prize though, and if this works we walk away with it. If not, at least you are relatively disposable," I said.

  "You say the sweetest things," Anna said.

  I bid Anna farewell and watched her drive off in the truck of the Righteous. One of the Mechanites went as well. He had less in the way of cybernetics than the others and I'd been able to cut the metal off him and replace it with flesh. Curiously, the flesh retained the same capabilities as the cybernetics I was replacing—there truly were possibilities in the odd hybridization of my abilities and those of Mechos.

  The Mechanite would be spreading the word of a battle between the Righteous and Hot Stuff and her Flames, setting the stage to lure in our prey.

  I expected this would take weeks. It almost left me at loose ends. There were any number of construction projects I might pursue now that I had upgraded my research facility to level three.

  Bioreactor - Level 3

  With this latest upgrade to your bioreactor you can install both growth routines and healing routines. Over time any traditional wiring in your facility will be replaced with organic conduits and the reactor capacity itself will slowly grow over time so long as there is access to water and biomatter. Damage to the reactor or the electrical systems of the facility will now automatically heal on a level scaling to the level of the facility Infirmary.

  It wasn't really an option, I had to do this upgrade. Power would soon become a bottleneck otherwise. Still, I had my concerns about replacing my electrical wiring with something organic. I'd had good reasons for making the choices I did, but I suspected it made me more vulnerable in many ways to things like toxins, for all that it also offered some advantages.

  I began the upgrade. It also meant there were a few others I needed to make sooner rather than later.

  There was nothing about an increase in healing speed, but then the reactor core scaled off the level of the Infirmary itself. I began this upgrade as well.

  There was one more important thing. With Hydroponics, I could produce biomass at will, which clearly was going to be a construction material for at least some of my resources going forward.

  Hydroponics - Level 3

  At the third level you have two options of how to proceed with your future growth.

  Growth Cylinders

  You can construct and grow vegetation on individual cylinders. This allows for more variety and specific environmental conditions. You'll be able to grow exotic plants sooner, although at a cost of more limited crop yields. With this your yields will remain constant for this level, but you will gain the ability to grow rare plants.

  Growth Vats

  You can also establish vast vats which allow for large scale growth operations. You will immediately gain the ability to feed up to sixteen people with any extra being deposited into your biomass stockpile. You can still grow uncommon plants with this setup although anything rarer will need to wait for future upgrades.

  I did like the idea of being more specialized, which the growth cylinders would allow, but I'd just decided to do this upgrade because of wanting to make sure I had more biomass to support future growth.

  Hydroponics provided a steady grain, and the random human wandering in from the surface could boost those yields—but they were hardly a reliable source.

  Given I hadn't yet even collected any uncommon plants, much less rare ones, it didn't seem like that hard a choice. I could pass up an immediate, real gain for one that I might not see manifest for some time, or ever.

  I began the construction of the Growth Vats.

  While I was building things for the humans I might as well round it out.

  Quarters - Level 3

  You have two options for how to proceed.

  Barracks

  This is the most like what you have now. A large room containing sixteen bunks, storage lockers, and a communal bath. This setup fosters the most feeling of community, but can also prove to be an issue with conflicting personalities. It allows for a quick mustering of a force for either manual labor or military asks.

  Cabins

  This option will still house sixteen, but instead of one central room it divides up the space into eight cabins of two beds each which can be scattered around the facility with individual baths. This allows the best option for residents to pair off and allows workers or researchers to live closer to their primary duties.

  The prompts didn't present it as such, but I also had to consider the virtues of a distributed system. With a single barracks, if a threat like Hot Stuff found herself inside, all the humans would die at once. Cabins were in many ways safer due to the distribution of resources. I chose that option.

  I was distracted from my upgrades by an alert. Hot Stuff was behind in her test routine. I toggled my focus and found her lounging against a wall.

  'Want to talk' had been burned into it.

  27

  "I wish I'd known finger-painting was your intellectual level, although your performance on my tests was giving me a pretty good idea," I said to Hot Stuff.

  Hot Stuff raised her middle finger at my camera. "Fuck you."

  "Your discourse is even worse. Why am I keeping you alive again?"

  "Been asking myself that same question. Thought at first you just liked the view, but that isn't it. You hit me with that stuff, shot me in the legs, you could have killed me, but you didn't. Been asking myself why."

  I didn't approve of my test subjects doing too much thinking for themselves.

  "And what did you come up with?"

  Hot Stuff shrugged. "You had me kill those people awhile back. Maybe you're keeping me safe just in case, like a bullet in the chamber."

  It was a reasonable hypothesis based on the information she had.

  "You are an impressive force of destruction," I said.

  "And you're good at holding me prisoner. You've proved you can hurt me. Maybe kill me. What I want is to make a deal."

  If she were anything other than a research subject I'd have been inclined to take her up on her offer. I admired what she could do when she put her mind to it. While I had come out ahead in our clashes, each time she'd done more than I'd thought she could.

  "You keep a bullet in the chamber. You don't make friends with it," I said.

  "Wait! Even if you won't let me out, there has got to be some kind of deal we can make to make things better. A little more sleep, better food, conjugal visits with the shy guy."

  I didn't think Mechos would go for that. I thought it would absolutely horrify him to have it brought up.

  I did have one Righteous left though. I didn't quite know how his power-dampening might work if he wound up in bed with Hot Stuff. I didn't need him any longer though and I was curious.

  "Do you actually have anything I want?" I asked.

  Hot Stuff glared defiantly. "Me and my boys, we owned our territory up there. Nobody wanted to pick a fight with us."

  "Yet I took you down because I wanted an easy start," I said.

  Hot Stuff gestured and I lost one camera in a fireball. That was fine, I had others. There was nothing she could really do to hurt me, and there was plenty I could do to hurt her. I knew she knew that, she just had to think this through.

  "I can point you to technology. You like that, right?" Hot Stuff asked.

  I did.

  "If you found anything worth taking, you'd have taken it for yourself," I said.

  "I don't wear clothes, don't use guns. Not a whole lot of need for much, except for accelerants."

  There was something to that.

  "I really should make some flame-retardant tarp to throw on top of you and spare myself the view. What do you think you ha
ve?" I asked.

  "A door. I know it doesn't sound like much, but it really is. Old, thick, one of those end of the world bunkers people always used to talk about before it all went to hell. As far as I know, it's never been opened."

  Despite my amnesia regarding the old world I could see the possibilities. A sealed door meant the technology inside could still be preserved and unlooted. And although unlikely, given the problems with electricity, the people inside might even still be alive.

  "Where?" I asked.

  "About three days southeast of Widow's Peak. You'll want to look for the collapsed roadway. The hatch is in a tunnel beneath some melted-together stones.

  That was interesting enough.

  I changed the progress of the Thomas' labyrinth to bring him here. It would take a while, but he'd get here and I'd fuse the two together.

  "It may be of some utility, enough to keep you alive at least. There is a young man on the way here that is a member of the Righteous. Kill him, fuck him, keep him as a pet—I don't care. If you do kill him he comes back a day later," I said.

  "Some combination of all of the above," Hot Stuff said, with a smile I think was malicious. Human behavior is so hard to quantify.

  I'd said that I didn't care, but I began the construction of some extra cameras. Whatever she had planned, I really did want to see how his power-resistance abilities would work when it came to contact with someone as strong as Hot Stuff.

  I left her to her fun and switched my attention over to Mechos in his workshop. The man seemed to be tinkering with some sort of circuit board contained in an insulated case.

  "Going to try to call for help? I thought everybody hated you as much as I did," I said.

  Mechos glanced up. "More I'm doing this for you. We seemed to be getting along well enough, I thought that you could use a defense from what I did to you."

  I remembered that, he had completely managed to shut down my senses for a while until Anna restarted my array.

  "You overloaded my sensory array somehow," I said.

  "Your electrical system in many ways acts like your nervous system. I introduced an overload. To create the needed complexity in you, in many ways you were modeled after humans," Mechos said.

  A disgusting thought. Worse, when combined with the knowledge that soon those very systems would be organic in nature.

  "I'll have a look when it's completed. Do you know anything about shelters constructed before the catastrophe?" I asked.

  Mechos chuckled darkly. "They were supposed to exist. Places the very best could hide themselves away. This laboratory was such a place too, and look what happened here."

  Everyone died, but pre-catastrophe me had made plans.

  It would be worth investigating this other facility at some point.

  28

  Two more weeks passed.

  Thomas was resistant to Hot Stuff's flames—for a while. It took a good few minutes of physical contact before he finally succumbed to the burns and perished. It wasn't for very long, but she seemed to be putting it to good use each day and learning how to better extend their time together.

  Thomas hadn't in any way been converted into a Flame. Either the contagion rate was low or the fact that he was already affected by the void core kept him from conversion by the fire core.

  When Anna arrived back at the base it wasn't as expected.

  A grinning woman dressed in colorful clothes materialized in the middle of Hydroponics, Anna sprawled at her feet. The woman was wounded, one arm and leg heavily bandaged.

  Anna had been tortured. Wounds covered most of her body and no attempt had been made to patch them up. Obviously our well-laid plan hadn't gone off quite as expected.

  "Emma? It is Emma, isn't it? Anna here said this is where I could find you. Looks like she told the truth."

  It must be Sylph. Her foot drew back and she kicked Anna's chest hard enough that my sensors could detect ribs cracking.

  I said, "Seems she's better at betraying my location than she was at killing you. You must be Sylph."

  I focused one of the water cannons at her skull and fired. The woman blinked away in an instant to reappear several feet away. Too fast for it to be human reaction time, some innate danger sense perhaps that triggered her teleporting abilities.

  "It took some convincing," Sylph said.

  Anna groaned and tried to crawl away.

  I triggered another water cannon. Sylph again transitioned away about a meter's distance.

  Plainly my goop trap in the truck hadn't caught Sylph, and it was likely because of this sensing of danger I was seeing now. Even though she hadn't known any threat was coming, her power instinctively transitioned her a short distance away. She likely never got sprayed with power-dampener, and missed out on the explosion entirely. The wounds she suffered must have been caused by Anna. That made me more forgiving of her failure.

  "And you decided to march into the lair of your enemy. Not terribly bright," I said.

  "Law of the predator. Kill those that try to kill you," Sylph said.

  I had a plan to deal with her. Since she'd tortured Anna badly enough to reveal the location of this place, Anna had probably revealed to her my vulnerabilities as well—my core and the reactor.

  Anna was smart though, smart enough to know that my reactor was the more dangerous of the two. I began moving coolant, it was going to be my best option.

  "What do you think you're going to do to me?" I asked.

  Sylph pulled something from her pocket. The bomb looked heavy in her hand, a series of tightly rolled tubes and a fuse.

  "Bomb for a bomb," Sylph said.

  "You'll never get through. Not even you. The door is ten inches of reinforced steel," I said.

  "I don't need a door," Sylph said, and she flickered out of existence.

  Sylph rematerialized in my Core Room. Anna had provided her with the details. It probably wasn't quite what Sylph was expecting, the bioreactor was now a steadily thrumming organ of reddish flesh streaked through with veins. Sylph didn't have time to appreciate it.

  The Reactor room was a far smaller space than Hydroponics, and I had figured something out. Sylph's instinctive teleport away from danger was only ever a few steps distance at the most. She had no control over that—she couldn't even stop it. There was only limited places within that short range that she would travel and I could attack all of them at once. This would hurt my reactor too, but I could heal.

  I flooded the chamber with liquid nitrogen—I'd been working hard to top up supplies after how useful it had proved in the past. Billowing droplets sprayed from the ceiling, freezing all flesh it encountered.

  The bomb fell from useless fingers to the floor and was frozen with the rest.

  It was agony. I hurt as the outside of the core froze. Still, with the Fire Matrix an internalized level of heat could be maintained. The same was not true for Sylph. For a moment, she became a blur within the room, her form flickering everywhere in an effort to get safe, but the falling mist froze her solid.

  Even while I was busy making a Sylphcicle I was having Anna dragged to the Infirmary and getting diagnostics back on her. Twenty-eight broken bones, massive internal bleeding, several toes were missing. Sylph hadn't been kind. It would take a solid month to restore her to health.

  With Sylph, I had to be a lot more cautious. I was certain I could kill her in this state and steal her crystal. Killing her, though, had only been the plan because capture hadn't seemed an option. Now perhaps containing her was possible, but I wanted to make sure.

  It was with considerable caution I had her transported down to the testing facility. With Thomas no longer taking up his own labyrinth I had one free. Then it was just a matter of upgrading Sylph with the temperature-resistant virus.

  I wasn't big on upgrading one of my enemies, but I didn't see a choice if I wanted her alive. Any attempt to defrost her normally would kill her.

  After the application of the upgrade Sylph shimmered, frost fading f
rom her skin. Her eyes looked around in panic. Again, the woman blurred as she attempted in vain to get outside the facility. Her powers worked only within the confines I had set.

  Sometimes plans go better than you could have hoped. Anna being out of commission for a month was a small price to pay for the taking of Sylph alive.

  29

  With Sylph trapped in a testing labyrinth I began her testing routine.

  Research Menu

  "Sylph"

  Sylph is bonded to a dimensional Power core and can teleport long distances as well as possesses an innate danger sense that teleports her short distances to avoid harm. It will take one month to unlock the abilities of her core. Further testing will accumulate core points at the rate of 0.1 per week.

  That was a long research time compared to some of the others, I couldn't tell if the time was going up based on the uniqueness of the ability or how much total research I had done to date.

  Anna had regained consciousness in the Infirmary, although the system there had her restrained so she wouldn't do further injury to herself while being put back together.

  "You leaked all over my floor, again," I said.

  "Did you get her?" Anna asked.

  "I got her, although she tried to set off a detonation charge inside my reactor core."

  "Good. I don't know what happened with the plan. I'd heard they were in the area so had my pistol loaded with the anti-power rounds. The explosion didn't kill her and she came at me," Anna said.

  That fit what I guessed happened.

  "How did someone who is as lousy a shot as you are manage to hit her? Especially with her abilities?" I asked.