It’ll all be over soon, he thought, there’s that at least. But he didn’t want it to be over. He wanted to live.
Fox tried to speak, to talk his way out of the inevitable, but got dropped to the ground before he could form the words. The breath left his lungs as a massive booted foot shoved him roughly into the side of his car. He lost his footing and fell into the puddle of puke next to Johnson’s semiconscious form.
“It was a rhetorical question, asshole. You don’t get to talk anymore. You’ve said enough.” The giant loomed over the quivering executive, “You don’t even care how many, do you? Of course you don’t. I don’t expect you to understand, because you are an erudite, self-absorbed piece of shit, but when you took my free will away, I couldn’t be a soldier anymore. You made me a slave.”
“I am not a slave anymore.”
Fox found himself face to face with the blank, unflinching faceplate of the monster he helped build, and too late realized the how poor his choice of words had been. The voice on the other side of the metal barrier was not angry though. It was heavy with depressed resignation.
“Years ago, I promised that if this ever happened to anyone else again, I would kill you all, do you remember that?”
Fox could recall that day with photographic clarity. Roland could be very dramatic when he wanted to be, and he had been sure to illustrate his conviction on that matter with several grisly demonstrations.
Fox nodded, “I remember.”
“Well, I’ve changed my mind. You get to live.”
Now fox was both confused and scared. It must have showed on his face, because Roland laughed, “I have it on good authority that you owe Pops Winter a lot of money. I also suspect that you will be unemployed very soon.”
Fox was starting to grasp the gravity of what he was hearing, and his terror was wearing at the edges of his composure. Roland twisted the knife harder, “The police will be here shortly, and they will catch your little death squad of mercenaries in the act of clearing out this building.”
Fox tried to calm himself; at least there was the reactor overload to cover his tracks.
“And I have already pulled the reactor core so the building won’t burn down and hide all that evidence.”
Fox cried, “That’s impossible!”
Roland laughed a hearty laugh, “I’m radiation-proof, you moron. I pulled it out with my bare hands. It was just good luck that Lucia and her father were leaving by the basement and noticed the overload alarm.”
That had been the call from Lucia earlier. Roland sent her up to commandeer the car while he went and fixed the reactor. It was a straightforward task for someone who could ignore the high temperatures and ionizing radiation.
Fox began to cry, which mad Roland chuckle, “You are going to go to jail, Fox. But that’s not how your story ends. One day, a couple of Combine men looking to curry favor with the bosses will catch you in a quiet corner of the prison. The guards will be conspicuously absent when it happens.”
The deep voce betrayed sadistic glee, “We both know what happens next, Leland. These guys are going to murder you in ways that can only be described as deeply disturbing and probably pornographic.”
Roland crossed his arms and stared down at the crying executive, “That is how the rest of your short life will go, Fox.” The malice in his voice was tinged with approval, “I’m choosing not to kill you. Because as a man that is my choice to make. You and that prick,” he kicked Johnson’s bedraggled body, “tried to take that choice away from me. People died because of that. The only solace I get to take from that is how you are going end up as one of those dead.”
The grim cyborg grabbed the squirming executive and dragged him to his feet, “Most importantly, asshole, the last one!” Roland brought his hand down across Fox’s thigh, and a crack signaled the breaking of his femur. It sounded like dry kindling being snapped for the fire and Fox collapsed, screaming in agony. Lucia winced.
“That one was for the Ribieros, dick.” Roland turned to Johnson, still a blubbering mess. He squatted down and peeled his helmet off to get a good look at the man who had the temerity to bring back one of the most horrific programs in military history. The architect of his own slavery.
What he saw was pathetic. “You aren’t even really a man, are you?” He growled. “I wasted years wondering if I was truly a human being anymore, when all the while it was you who was the monster.”
Johnson sobbed like a baby, he couldn’t even form words, and tears and snot ran unchecked down his face. Roland’s voiced cracked, heavy with rage and sorrow, “I was a goddamn soldier, you sackless invertebrate! I’ve put bullets in bodies in nineteen systems. My footprints are on twenty-one planets. I have seen the length and breadth of this galaxy, been to places I’ll never have the words to describe. But that doesn’t amount to a pile of shit to you, does it?”
A black fist stood the doctor up with ungentle haste and held the trembling mess at arm’s length.
“What do you think of me now, Geppetto? Are you proud of your great creation?” No one could tell if Roland actually wanted an answer to that. He was somewhere else, eyes distant and voice shaking. Even through his pain, Fox knew to keep quiet. There was something very dangerous and terrifying going on inside of Roland Tankowicz.
The doctor, oblivious to everything but his own terror, just sobbed all the louder.
Roland released the man, who collapsed in a blubbering heap. With a weariness borne of abject despondence, the looming warrior’s head sagged and his voice broke, “I’ve hated you so much for so long that I forgot how pitiful you really are. You don’t deserve the death I’d give you.”
It was all so stupid and meaningless. Roland had so much more to say, so much he wanted to get out. He wanted to put all the weight of his own guilt and rage on these two where it belonged. But they wouldn’t care about any of it. Trying to make them understand what they had done to him was wasting his breath and wasting his time. His pain, his guilt, his fear: it was all meaningless. It always had been.
“Fuck you both,” was all he could manage, his voice choked with grief and fury. The only regret they would ever feel was for the consequences they had to endure themselves. There was no catharsis here, no closure. There never had been. The desolation of that realization overwhelmed Roland. He would never be free of what these two had done. He could only live with it.
“… just… fuck you…” He couldn’t stop his tears. He didn’t want them to come. Soldiers didn’t cry. These pricks didn’t deserve to see him cry. But the tears would not be denied. He cried for a twenty-year-old, head to toe in army green, trying to save the world and do right by his people.
He blinked, and he cried for the broken twenty-two-year-old with no arms or legs being told he could still be a hero and save the word.
Roland sank to his knees. He cried for the armored soldier who watched his friends murder women and children while his masters congratulated each other on their cleverness.
Finally, he cried for that perfect weapon. He cried for the machine locked in an empty cell under a mountain.
He cried for a young man trapped in a shell, being told that the world he was trying to save didn’t want him, just the machine he had become. It was made very clear in that cold and dark place that all he could do was kill, and that was all anyone had ever wanted him for. Without an enemy to fight, Roland Tankowicz was just aging military ordnance, and that was all he could ever be.
But suddenly, the melancholy internal monologue was interrupted by small, strong arms around his neck. Distantly, he heard the only thing that had made him feel human in decades: Lucia’s voice. Hearing it made all his creator’s words ring hollow, and a flame flickered to life at the bottom of his soul.
“Roland! It’s OK. We’ve won. We can go. Let’s go, big guy.” She was gentle, and pleading, and full of sympathy. When Roland turned to look at her, there was neither fear nor confusion in her eyes. She wasn’t looking at a killing machine. She couldn�
��t even see the weapon anymore; just a hurt, desperate old soldier who wanted to know that what he had fought for was still there. He felt something in that moment, and the part of him that was still a man latched onto that feeling, if only to save itself.
I can be OK, he realized, as long as she says I’m OK. The giant shoulders slumped as he surrendered to her embrace, if only for a moment.
Buttressed by Lucia, the iron resolve that had defined him as a soldier began to assert itself. Roland didn’t understand what it meant or what the consequences would be, but he wasn’t ready to give up yet. Not when that tiny woman refused to let the spark of humanity at his core die out. If she thought he was worth saving, then maybe he was.
The thought came unbidden, but he welcomed it. I don’t have to be what they made me. Maybe I can’t be who I was before, but I can still be what she wants me to be.
His broken body shifted, and Roland prepared himself to do the last thing he needed to. A duty to himself and his dead friends remained, and he was the only one left to see it done.
“It can’t… It can’t ever happen… again” he breathed through his tears.
“It won’t.” Lucia said, “We’ll make sure of it.”
Roland shook his head and tried to rise, but Lucia held him tightly. He pleaded, knowing that he had this one terrible task left to complete. It was a task he didn’t want her to see, “You don’t understand, they won’t stop, they’ll try again and again and again…” He was a soldier still. He had to be. If not a soldier, then what was he? He wasn’t ready to answer that question.
The mission wasn’t over yet.
He was again interrupted again, this time by a gunshot, and he looked in stark disbelief at the 5mm hole in the center of Dr. Johnson’s forehead as it lightly wafted thin grey smoke. Behind the scientist’s frozen visage, blood and viscous grey brain matter ran in chunky pink streaks down the side of the car. Johnson's body pitched forward and crumpled face-down onto the landing pad. His eyes gaped in blank emptiness and his left leg twitched as the last of his living nerves fired in stubborn defiance of reality. Warren Johnson died in a puddle of his own vomit, taking all his secrets and knowledge with him.
“They’ll have to do it without him, then,” Lucia said with enough iron in her voice to build a skyscraper. She holstered her pistol, “Now let’s go, Corporal. Cops’ll be here any minute.”
Roland took one last look at Fox, moaning in agony and glassy-eyed with shock, and gave the broken executive a sarcastic salute.
"Have a nice life, asshole," it wasn't much of a send-off, but it was all he had.
Roland and Lucia piled into the car, and she took the controls from her exhausted father. Donald looked into the back seat and smiled, “It is good to see you again, my friend,” then he scowled slightly, “but I’m not sure I am thrilled with the influence you appear to have had on my sweet little Lucia!”
Roland’s moment of sadness evaporated at the sheer, bleak, ridiculousness of that statement. He laughed a deep, guttural laugh that made his broken ribs sting, “Oh, you are just gonna love the rest of the story then!”
Lucia snorted from the driver’s seat, “Not the time, Corporal!”
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Donald Ribiero needed a full week to recover from his ordeal. Roland needed about the same. During this time, Lucia doted on them both as only a daughter could, much to the old man’s chagrin and Roland’s consternation.
Having the Doctor Ribiero available for Roland’s recovery had been helpful, as he was the foremost living expert on the cyborg, and could ensure that all his systems returned to optimal ranges. Once he had felt his own mind clearing from the drugs they had used to make him pliable, and after a few hot meals and some sleep, Donald had been raring to get out of bed and get caught up.
Of course, at the age of eighty-one his body had been somewhat slower in recovering than he would have preferred. Lucia’s iron will and newfound ferocity were well-taxed with the task of keeping her father in bed.
There was much to get caught up on as well. Corpus Mundi was in the throes of a full-on press blitz trying to spin the debacle near the Sprawl in as positive a light as they could. It seemed that a certain mid-level executive had hired a rogue group of Galapagos mercenaries to raid the building on behalf of a nefarious competitor. The sobering truth was that not even the mighty Corpus Mundi was safe from the threat of corporate espionage. Only the timely intervention of the brave men and women of the New Boston PD, with assistance from the legendary Pike’s Privateers had contained the carnage.
Since that fanciful story kept all of them out jail as well, the team decided to let it ride. Roland hoped that enough of a message had been sent to the brass at Corpus Mundi to keep them out of their hair, and their own silence should help seal that unspoken deal. The Combine was likely to be pretty pissed at him, but he could handle them if it came to that. They were going to be busy dealing with Big Woo for a while yet, and Roland knew he could count on McGinty if he needed to.
Though tastefully avoided, eventually they all wanted to hear an answer for the big question: Why had Donald Ribiero augmented his own daughter knowing what that would mean for her life?
The answer, it turned out, was both simple and complicated at the same time. It came over breakfast, eight days after their flight form the Corpus Mundi building. The three of them were in Donald’s spacious apartment, seated at his dining room table and chowing down on stacks of French toast and mountains of scrambled eggs. Lucia’s appetite had not waned, and Roland had always been a big eater.
“I did it to save your life, Lucy,” he finally said, when his strength had returned.
“When you were in your early teens, you developed a rare neurological condition,” he explained, “Due to a bizarre form of seizure activity, you were losing the ability to make new neurons, and some other types of brain cells as well. We had to assume it was a neurological mutation of some kind, because we didn’t really have an analogue for it to compare to.”
Lucia nodded. Mutations were not uncommon, and it was a rare mutation that generated an entirely positive effect.
“We could stabilize the condition by controlling the seizures, but we could not reverse its effects. You would have always struggled to learn new things after that point, and there was a very high probability that you would continue to suffer cognitive losses in the future.”
The old man turned misty-eyed, “I couldn’t bear the thought of that, so I took a lucrative offer from Corpus Mundi. I already held several patents on synthetic neurons, and I knew that they would assign me to something that would give me access to better equipment and an unlimited budget. Which is exactly what happened: They assigned me to the program that was developing Roland’s team.”
Roland was confused, “Wait a minute, you said she was in her early teens, but that was more than twenty-five years ago!”
“Closer to thirty, actually,” Donald agreed.
Lucia looked at Roland like he was a moron, “Yeah? So? I’m forty-four years old.”
Roland’s jaw dropped and his eyes bugged slightly. Lucia just had to have some fun with it, “What? You thought you were dating a younger woman? Sorry to disappoint you!”
Now Donald looked shocked, “Dating?”
Lucia’s face betrayed instant regret and more than a little panic, “Never mind, Dad. Go on with the story,” Lucia attempted to put the conversation back on track. Donald gave Roland a long look though narrowed eyes. Roland pretended to be fascinated with the contours of the table top.
“Well,” the old man continued, “Well, with the help of Dr. Johnson,” he sneered at the name, “I figured out how to build functional nerves and signals from nanomachines that worked with the synthetic neurons, and we used those to make Roland’s chassis work. That’s when I knew it could help Lucia.”
“Now, I had also figured out how to use those machines to enhance the parallel processing power of a host brain.” He looked at their blank faces,
“I could grow fake neurons that were better than regular ones.” They nodded, and he shook his head in frustration, “The problem was that the host brain was always attached to a regular body, and then the signal latency the brain perceived from the host body would create horrible feedback loops.”
Donald realized that he had completely lost both his listeners, so he paraphrased, “I had made a prosthetic nervous system out of little robots, but unless they were carefully matched to the right kind of body, they caused seizures and paralysis.”
Lucia looked at her giant companion and said with exaggerated slowness, “Those are bad.” He nodded sagely in return,
Lucia and Roland then looked back to the doctor and nodded in unison, and Donald went on, “It was easy in Roland’s case, we built the body from scratch specifically to house this new tech. No latency, no problem. They are a matched set.”
“With Lucia it was much harder. I did the best I could, dear, but I couldn’t perfect it before I had to leave the program.”
They all knew what he meant by that, and no one begrudged him his choice.
“I had to flood your body with the nanobots, and then monitor and adjust them on the fly as new feedback loops developed. Remember your clumsy phase, dear?”
Lucia did remember it, and had chalked it up to pubescent awkwardness. “Well that makes more sense now!” she chuckled.
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