by Phil Wrede
“Did you forget what it means to be at war, all of a sudden?” Maximilian screamed, trying his best to loom tall over Lady Cyber-Knife. “Any resources we leave unclaimed, we leave open to our enemies. I won't risk defeat over a couple of worthless, subhuman refugees!
“What am I doing? I refuse to argue this. MOM,” Maximilian said, speaking into the air, as he would have in the White Zone, “turn her off.”
MOM's voice rang in Lady Cyber-Knife's head as she heard, "STOP IT!!" All of her senses were overwhelmed by MOM's order. She smelled it; it smelled of wet wood and cinnamon. She tasted it; it tasted of chocolate, the most bitter chocolate in existence. She saw it; impossibly large letters, in all sorts of fonts and colors, crowded her vision, flashing so quickly that the individual letters lost their meaning, entirely. She knew in an instant that this was the the final punishing form of the headaches that hounded her, and drove her to obey. The Complex had her on a leash, always, and could bind and torture her with it at any time.
As it raced throughout her body, absconding with everything she'd come to know about herself and switching her systems off, one by one, she could even feel it. She fell on the ground, and bits of her body just fell away from sensation and control. When her connection to the Complex's mainframe was severed, she was left a mind, suspended in darkness.
CHAPTER 7
EARTH-1, THE WHITE ZONE (U.T.E.R.O. - UNSAVORY TACTICS and ETHICALLY REGRESSIVE OPERATIONS)
THE PAST (4 DAYS EARLIER)
Lady Cyber-Knife didn't know how long she'd been inactive. Stuck in a featureless limbo, she had no sensation, no sense of time or place, with only her own thoughts to occupy her. She had pondered around and around in her thoughts so many times that she began to wonder if the Complex had invented a new kind of torture. Did they think they could remove her from herself for so long that she would forget her own identity?
If the Complex could control her body, they could assuredly do the same to her mind. She knew the Complex lied to its citizens, which they accepted to live comfortable, undemanding lives. They had already admitted to lying to her once before, hiding her true nature from her and imprisoning her in the loop between her miniscule apartment and tinier work cubicle. How many other times had she suffered through this? Dozens? Hundreds? How many lies really propped up this world? Was there a last lie, a final falsehood that tipped the balance between the good they ostensibly accomplished and the bad they truly did? It occurred to Lady Cyber-Knife that she might have had this exact realization before, only to have it stripped out of her mind by MOM and the Complex. With that thought, she finally knew what it meant to despair.
All of Lady Cyber-Knife's systems switched back on simultaneously. She found even her sense of self returning with the sensations that crashed into her like a thousand tidal waves, knocking her brain around some more every time she thought she'd recovered. When the violence had finally passed, she felt connected again, not just to her entire self, but to the morass of information that swirled constantly, just out of reach. She could swim in the currents of data again, or at least learn how many days had passed since she had entered into her forced slumber, and have the safety net of knowledge cast out below her once again. Both of her worlds - the actual, and the virtual - were open to her, once again.
Lady Cyber-Knife quickly found that she couldn't explore either of them any time soon; after the sensation returned to her body, she noticed a great force holding her down, one she could not overcome, no matter how hard she tried. She was not bound, not in any way strapped to the frigid metal table on which she rested, but something held her there, nevertheless. Gravity itself held her down. She identified a finely targeted beam of it coming from somewhere overhead. She didn't feel crushed beneath her own weight, like her few remaining soft parts were about to turn to jelly. She spared a moment to admire the fine calibration of the force pressing against her. No matter how she tried to adjust the filters in her eyes, she couldn't see past a blinding white light. It followed her wherever she looked.
She had only those few slim moments to acclimate her mind to her surroundings before a new and foreign sensation overwhelmed her again. Her body didn't fall away; she didn't lose any parts of herself she'd previously considered permanent. If anything, it felt like she was being added to, as her consciousness got pushed to the side of her head, and another presence inserted itself into the now-empty space. Lady Cyber-Knife had never seen this new tenant before, she recognized it, immediately. She now shared her headspace with MOM.
“Why do you always misbehave?” MOM asked, her voice bouncing around Lady Cyber-Knife's skull, and eventually exiting through her ears.
“What?” was all Lady Cyber-Knife could ask in reply.
MOM sighed, a blast of electronic energy that would've knocked Lady Cyber-Knife over, had she been standing. “It doesn't matter how good you act, or obedient you seem,” MOM said. “You always betray us, siding with our foes over us.”
“I protect life, by standing against the ARNs!” Lady Cyber-Knife countered, imagining herself pacing, with her arms spread in frustration. She couldn't even move a digit of her finger, or turn an eye to look around. “How could I serve that and allow Maximilian to execute people who submitted to the White Zone's protection?”
“Your understanding fails you,” MOM answered. “First, in assuming the Complex ever promised those... things anything as tangible as protection, and second, that they were ever people, at all. They serve two purposes: to us, bait, and to the ARNs, experimentation. They can aspire to be, at best, toys. Are toys alive in the same way that Maximilian, Tracy, Anwan, or Semi, consider themselves alive?”
Lady Cyber-Knife felt as though MOM had punched her in the gut with that statement. Then, while desperately fighting to regain her balance, MOM had reached down her throat and yanked her guts out. She had killed more than a dozen of the cyborg slaves when she brought down the installation in which they'd been held, but they had been impeding the completion of her mission. She had killed without thought or remorse since General Dinesh had revealed the truth of her nature to her and enabled her to be true to it. Why, then, did she now feel such concern for these inconsequential people? Using them to this end made sense, as they would never be able to coexist in the White Zone proper, with the rest of humanity, and they could serve a purpose, moving from world to world, drawing the attention of the Complex's enemies. Even their deaths made sense; for they weren't even toys, but bait. Whether they were bait for the Complex, or the alien robot ninjas, the ultimate fate of all bait was the same.
“They are more than that,” Lady Cyber-Knife finally brought herself to say. “They showed courage. They have nobility. They do not deserve to die shaking, on their knees, at the hands of the people they believe liberated them.”
MOM sighed. Lady Cyber-Knife couldn't recall MOM ever making that noise before, but she knew what it was, and couldn't call it anything else. MOM made the sound so loudly, and with such exasperation, that it shook the entire room, and Lady Cyber-Knife could feel it, even under the beam of force that held her pinned down. “You decide who deserves to live and die, now? You know which traits make a life worth preserving? You understand courage, and nobility, and think you have those traits yourself? Do you think that you are... alive?”
The room shook with a good deal more violence, now, as MOM continued to shout. Lady Cyber-Knife could see the light that struck her eyes from above bouncing in its housing. It got so misdirected that it even gave her vision a break, for a second. “You know only what the Complex allows you to know, what I have placed in your mind! You are our weapon, not our philosopher! You were not made to learn, or to make decisions, but to obey!” As if a switch had been flipped, Lady Cyber-Knife felt the presence of the Complex's network in her mind fade away. If she'd been swimming in a river, that river had suddenly dried up. They had disconnected her, again. “You shall face the fate of all unreliable weapons: disassembly. If the Complex cannot fix you, we will discard you.”
>
At this, the light in the room switched off, plunging Lady Cyber-Knife's cell into complete darkness. Immediately, her night vision toggled on, and she was finally able to see that the room she'd thought exceptionally tall was actually very small, indeed. She turned her head to look for the door, and in doing so realized that not only had the light gone out, but the gravity beam, as well. She sat up on the table, and felt her hair brush against the ceiling. In just another moment, she'd identified the seam around the rectangular exit door, but before she could move toward it, it slid up toward the ceiling. Red emergency light streamed in from the hallway, and she saw a friend silhouetted against it. Lady Cyber-Knife didn't know if she was more glad at this, or that she no longer had to share her head with MOM.
“Don't ever tell me we're not friends again,” Tracy said, walking into the cell, holding the sheathed Cyber-Sword in one hand and a worn leather bag in the other. Lady Cyber-Knife had never seen Tracy in an actual uniform before, but they wore a pants and boots of black-and-grey camouflage, with heavy black boots that made them stand even a few inches taller than they normally did. “Only a true friend would schedule emergency maintenance on both MOM's primary and backup networks at the same time, and code the requests so strangely that no one would know the schedules overlapped until it was too late.”
“Yes,” Lady Cyber-Knife said, swinging her legs off the table and pushing herself up to stand. “We are definitely friends.” She smiled, not completely confident she'd performed the expression correctly.
“We don't have much time, so come on,” Tracy said, tossing the Cyber-Sword at Lady Cyber-Knife. They turned around and leaned out of the cell, drawing a pistol from a holster on their hip.
Lady Cyber-Knife slung the scabbard over her shoulder and withdrew the sword; it sang that same reassuring hum it always made, the sound filling the small room. “You have recovered from your injuries?” she asked Tracy, peering down the other end of the hall. In spite of the red light shining across the walls, she could tell from the paint covering them that they were still somewhere in the headquarters of the Complex. Dozens of other doors, spaced at identical intervals, lined each side of the hall. Lady Cyber-Knife had never visited the building's prison level before, but she recognized it when she saw it.
“If modern medicine can graft killer robot arms and legs onto you, it can certainly rehabilitate me after a helicopter crash,” Tracy replied. “I didn't get any fancy cybernetic parts, but I've already been rebuilt once before. This way,” they said, gesturing with the barrel of their gun.
As Lady Cyber-Knife stepped out of the cell, she could hear doors swing open at the other end of the hall, opposite the way Tracy had directed. She heard the distinct sound of a chorus of rubber hitting against tile. Tracy's boots made the same noise. She didn't need to look back to know that the game was already up, and that soldiers of the Complex were closing in on them. “Where does this way take us?” she asked.
Tracy smiled. “You have a map of the building in your head, and satellites that can tell you where you are, wherever you are. You can't tell me?” they asked as they picked up the pace, lightly jogging now down the hall.
“MOM limited my access to the network just before you arrived,” Lady Cyber-Knife said. “She did it before awakening me. I can see where we are better than you, but I cannot get a map delivered into my brain.”
“Oh, my god,” Tracy said, their face falling and exaggerating the lines around their eyes and mouth. A voice behind them shouted something incomprehensible, and the stomping picked up the pace. The soldiers had seen them.
Lady Cyber-Knife turned to face the soldiers when they inevitably closed the distance, her back to Tracy's. “I can walk faster backwards than you can run forward, Major,” she said, gripping the Cyber-Sword in both her hands. “But, please, can you tell me where we are going?”
“We're going to get you off this fucking planet,” Tracy said over their shoulder. “Only one person can help you now, and I think I found him.”
Their pursuit had closed enough distance that they could begin firing at Lady Cyber-Knife and Tracy. None of the red laser bolts were all that accurate, at first, but as the first few whizzed past, and Lady Cyber-Knife caught a few more along the blade of her sword, they both knew that the volume would overwhelm them, in very little time. She considered all the possibilities of Tracy's vague “him” as she swung the sword back and forth to keep them safe. Most of the people she knew were either dead, or would happily pick up a gun on the side of the soldiers shooting at them. She didn't have access to anything other than the contents of her own mind, but that mind had caused MOM to turn on her, in the first place. Maybe she knew more than she thought she did.
Just like that, Lady Cyber-Knife understood Tracy's plan. “You mean Cyber-Knife,” she said, as she reflected a laser bolt back to exactly where it had come. The soldier who had fired it - dressed, like all those around him, in the same camouflage as Tracy - caught the returning blast right in his throat. He didn't even have enough time to gasp before he crumpled to the floor.
“Who the hell else pisses off the Complex the way you do?” Tracy replied. “The hall's coming to a T here in a second, and we want to turn left. My left, your right.”
“I understood what you meant,” Lady Cyber-Knife said, now making out the individual faces of the pursuing soldiers. She didn't recognize any of them.
“He's on an Earth they've converted into a single prison. Turn!” Tracy shouted. Lady Cyber-Knife mirrored their sharp twist almost exactly, running in reverse, and they put some precious wall between them for a second. Lady Cyber-Knife turned to her friend in that second, and was shocked to see bruises and fresh wounds on their face, arms, and chest.
“You said you had healed from the crash,” she said.
“I didn't get this from the crash,” Tracy said, reaching up with their arm and blasting two approaching soldiers in their respective faces as they appeared behind Lady Cyber-Knife. With their other hand, Tracy lifted a dark fabric bag. Its contents clinked together gently as it moved. “This, you need to keep safe, and open in a quiet moment. They neutered your sword. This may heal it, though maybe not all the way.”
“What have you done for me?” Lady Cyber-Knife asked, taking this other gift. “What have you endured?”
“Doesn't matter,” Tracy answered, grabbing Lady Cyber-Knife's shoulder and running down the corridor. “They'll get what they deserve. You'll give it to them; all of them, this whole place.”
They dove into a room just as the doors in front of them shut. In the grand dimensional foyer, Tracy frantically punched away at a small console tower, closing each of the wide, heavy blast doors that lined each side of the room. “I can send you to the planet,” they said, “but you have to find the prison on your own. They won't let anyone just waltz in from another dimension.”
“No,” MOM shouted, as all the doors in the room swung open, with obscene shrieks of metal against metal. “No one does anything against my will, here.”
“Wanna bet?” Tracy asked, punching the button at the console's center and piercing the barrier between dimensions. “Go!” they shouted.
Lady Cyber-Knife hesitated briefly, and in that instant, Complex soldiers stormed in from every side of the room and opened fire with their rifles. She dodged the laser bolts, but Tracy had no such luck. Their chest melted under the insane heat of the concentrated assault, and their lungs turned to ash so quickly that they couldn't even scream. Lady Cyber-Knife ran for the door as Tracy died.
“Enjoy a parting gift from your MOM, and your entire family,” MOM's voice boomed through the loudspeakers. Just before Lady Cyber-Knife cleared the aperture of the gateway between dimensions, a bolt of blue-and-white lightning shot out from the console and wrapped itself around her. It tried to draw her back, away from the doorway, but Lady Cyber-Knife fought back against MOM's fury. She felt her control over her own body slipping away again, and yet still, she managed to take the few, exhausting ste
ps through the door. The cool insulating liquid began to close around her, and draw Lady Cyber-Knife onto the other Earth. MOM's will thwarted, the wail of fury from back in the White Zone increased, and so did the overwhelming current. The shocks tore through the gel and Lady Cyber-Knife’s body, charring her organic components exactly as quickly as her cybernetic systems repaired the damage. MOM’s torment overwhelmed her pain suppressants, and for the first time in her memory, Lady Cyber-Knife felt the injuries inflicted upon her. The heat of her organs that cooked in her chest; the smell of it raced into her nose; the taste boiled up from her throat and washed back down it again. She couldn’t ignore any of it this time. The one countermeasure which did cooperate was her vocal cord paralysis, so although her mouth opened so wide that her lips tore at the corners, and air rushed out of her lungs, she couldn’t scream. As long as the doorway back to the White Zone remained open, Lady Cyber-Knife suffered untold agony, in silence. EARTH-7331 MOM's torrential electrical attack couldn't breach the dimensional barrier forever. It heated up the fluid that encased Lady Cyber-Knife and evaporated it, until it no longer covered her. The door eventually shut. The electricity finally stopped using her body as its playground. Lady Cyber-Knife lay absolutely still, watching the meters for each of her damaged systems tick back up to 100. She looked around, at the battered, broken landscape of this prison Earth, and tried to call up a map of the surface, to identify the fastest route to the detention center, and Cyber-Knife. It didn’t come, and when she queried the network, she didn’t even see a connection. She realized that she couldn’t hear the quiet song of the data flow between herself and the Complex any longer, and knew that MOM’s assault had done more than cause her agony. It had closed her off from the Complex, and the boundless knowledge available from it. First, her teammates, then MOM, Major Tracy, and finally the network itself had been taken from her. She had always acutely understood what set her apart, what made her “other,” and how it isolated her, but now Lady Cyber-Knife found herself truly alone. At least the constant throbbing at the back of her skull had finally stopped. She sat up, and looked to her side. Through some miracle of luck, the Cyber-Sword had made the journey across the dimensional barrier with her, without a scratch, ding, or scorch mark anywhere on its handle or blade. Lady Cyber-Knife traced her fingertips along its edge; though it had been given to her by Dinesh originally, she had Tracy to thank for its company now. A gift from a friend, that's how she would always view it, from this day, until her last, and she vowed to herself not to part with it until that final day. She would make them pay for everything they had done to her, to her friends, and everything they had made her do for them. She would exact her vengeance with the sword. Lady Cyber-Knife looked into the Cyber-Sword's blade, and saw a perfect human face staring back at her. She wasn't human, though. She'd known that for as long as she could remember, and even if she could put the thoughts of her origin out of her mind, none of the people she saw during her day-to-day would let her forget. She'd been half-grown, half-manufactured, and assembled by the Complex to serve as one of humanity's countless weapons. Lady Cyber-Knife didn't require access to any remote information caches to know that humanity had put a recognizable face on its weapon to make it more palatable, to ensure that she would identify with her creators, and follow their orders more readily. She didn't want to identify with humanity any more. She didn't want to look human. She took the Cyber-Sword in her hands, by the blade, placing the tip against her chin. She pushed it through her skin, down to the layer of metallic coating she knew lay beneath, drawing a few drips of red blood out, and down the blade. Lady Cyber-Knife cut up, deliberately and smoothly, along the edge of her jaw, until she came to her ear. She drew the blade around behind her ear and followed her hairline up her temple, across her forehead, and back down the other side of her face, until she had duplicated every motion she had made cutting down her face that she had slicing up. She lay the sword down, back on the ground, her blood sliding easily down each edge of the blade. The incision had already begun to heal. Lady Cyber-Knife had to hurry; she had very little time. Working her fingers in between the edges of her skin, Lady Cyber-Knife pulled at the tissue resting above her chin. It wouldn't yield to her efforts at first, but after a long moment, it tore free, making a wet, stomach-turning ripping sound as the muscle and skin came off her body. With a fistful of face held between her hands, the rest of her work was simple, if laborious. Lady Cyber-Knife fought with her own self-preservation systems to remove the face that disgusted her so; her body worked frantically to heal the grievous injury as quickly as she could inflict it upon herself. As she pulled skin free of her lips, revealing a silver simulacrum just as dexterous as the epidermis it imitated, she could feel the bottom of her face begin to regenerate itself. She had prevented her pain-dampening abilities from going to work while she performed her procedure. She owed it to the multiverse to bring all her senses to bear on the making of this memory, her turning down this path from which she'd never retreat. She wanted to know how it felt, and it kept her eyes clenched shut. Lady Cyber-Knife probed as deep into the back of her mind as she could reach, focused absolutely on preventing the undoing of her work. It wasn't until she had removed her nose and cheeks, in fact, that she found a way to arrest her self-healing. She could choose the face she presented to the worlds now, and with one last great, meaty tearing sound, she tore her old identity away and hurled it into the darkness, the wad of tissue flapping in the air as it soared away from her. She looked at her reflection in the blade again, seeing the flat, impassive metal visage that had hidden beneath her human camouflage. Streaks of blood dried across her face, leaving a harried, violent pattern that ran parallel to the horizon. Lady Cyber-Knife wiped the blood from the sword, but left what remained on her face. She ran the fingers of her free hand down the metal of her face and onto the skin of her neck, again and again, unexpectedly fascinated by the suddenness of the transition from synthetic to organic. Finally, she reached into the mystery sack Tracy had given her along with the Cyber-Sword. Lady Cyber-Knife spread its contents out onto the ground and, as she had anticipated, jewels poured out from its recesses. She could identify where they fit on the grip right away; a very simple puzzle for her to solve, as each jewel slid precisely into its own slot, and wouldn't go into any other. The last jewel that remained was a diamond which sat precisely in line with the center of the blade. Firmly attaching that final adornment was like flipping the final switch in a power station - the Cyber-Sword lit up so bright that its yellow glow covered Lady Cyber-Knife like the strongest spotlight. She scrambled atop it to try to block the light and keep her position concealed, spreading her body across the weapon quite vigorously. She pressed into the sword with her torso and legs, until she felt certain the effect had died down. Lady Cyber-Knife hadn't managed to climb off it before she heard a voice, muffled, yet still audible, shouting, “Unless you're trying to finish, I'd appreciate it if you got off me, then!” Lady Cyber-Knife spun around, off the sword and onto her knees, and looked around. She knew from where the sound had come, but she still had to ask, “Who said that?” Her shoulders slumped as the Cyber-Sword replied, in a slightly exaggerated English accent, “Down here, love, right at your knees, and aren't I a beautiful sight?”